You'd spot Pierrot through he window of his clapped out white van with his cap on, one hand on the wheel, the other his cigarette. Or he'd tootle past the house on his bike. Or you'd find him looking at the ducks on the pond, or the clouds with something useful to be said about the weather. He had a tractor, another frequent mode of transport, which he'd use to pull along a water tank to take to the cows in his field. And if he wasn't on the move, then he'd be at Philippe's next door, having a glass of something. If he did the inviting, it could start quite early in the morning and it was always eau de vie, small glasses, but several of them. He had grown up in the village, thought not too much of it, but was only too happy to share useful secrets like how to make eau de vie, and where to buy the best champagne. He lived with his daughter Nadine ever since his wife had died, thirty four years ago. His second daugher lived next door to them (and to us) and the third daughter lives about 10 kilometres away. You could go round for a drink at Pierrot's and find four generations in the same room, milling in and out, frequently.

So his funeral was bound to be a sad affair. But nothing had led me to expect how many people would be feeling the same thing. We were invited to turn up in the courtyard of his farm for three o'clock to go with him to the graveyard. When we got there, just before three the courtyard was already lined, round all of its sides with five or six deep with people. There must have been at last three hundred of us. And for a long time we waited, almost silently, for Pierrot to come out of his farmhouse for the last time. At last he was carried out, and laid in his coffin on little trestles. Nadine popped on top a photo of him. He had a wide grin in a thin face. And then, in the by now gently falling snow, a motley band of trumpeters started up. A French favourite, that I recognised but couldn't name, rather cheery music, and then Vivali, from the Four Seasons.

And then this huge crowd of sad mourners, red faced and in anoraks that were not up to that kind of cold, followed Pierrot in the hearse full of flowers, very slowly through the village and outside to the cemetary where he would finally re-join his long lost wife.

Oh I said in a bright moment to our neighbour Francoise 'I could do with a couple of glasses of cognac after this' She smiled and almost laughed and on we went.

The cemetary is small and there was hardly room for everyone. There was a speech and then one by one we inched round to Pierrot's grave and took a rose petal from a basket to toss into his grave. And then more music, this time rather perky dance music. And back we walked, almost as cold as poor Pierrot to the village for the wake.

And then my surprise, in Phillippe's 'bar' where champagne and cognac and eau de vie flow as if they came directly out of the tap, there was just one long trestle table and on it were bottles of coke and perrier water, interspaced down the middle. Someone was brewing coffee and there was a tin of biscuits passed around. And then that awful realisation that there was no cognac, no eau de vie, no warming red wine. We were there, purple as turnips from the cold, sad and drained of emotion, and we were on our own. Finally I said to Claude, wow in England we have whisky at funerals and as he too was cold and sad he wandered off and came back with a perrier bottle, full of eau de vie. And so in this nation dedicated to the good life and alcohol, we drank it secretly.