"Like ladders and wheel-barrows, benches, and plough-shares, they have turned out more durable than the lives and endeavours they express."

Gillian Tindall and her family had bought a tiny property on the edge of the village of Chassignolles in the Berry. One afternoon she had gone to an abandoned, shuttered house to collect a 19th century footstool that had been promised her. In the half dark, on a mantelshelf, she had found a small cardboard box with love-letters in it, addressed to a certain Célestine more than 100 years ago.

The discovery kindled her novelist's imagination. Who was Célestine ? What had become of her ? To find out, Gillian Tindall began to explore the history of her adopted French village …