The idea of spending the entire summer cut off from the world worried Franck but delighted Lise, so Franck had agreed, somewhat reluctantly and largely out of love, to rent this house in the Lot region, which was nowhere to be seen and had no network. The ad spoke of a cottage lost in the hills, of calm and peace. But nothing of the bloody past of this place, which no one lived in anymore and which had sheltered a German tamer and his wild beasts during the First World War. And nothing of the collarless dog, whether a dog or a wolf, which had imposed itself on the couple from the very first evening and which seemed to be looking for a master. Arriving that summer, Franck still believed that nature, which had been tamed as well as a pet, no longer had anything wild about it; he thought that the wars of the past, where men killed each other, had given way to more insidious, less deadly wars. That was when I arrived. Serge Joncour tells the story, a century later, of a village in the Lot region, and he unearths a whole past populated by beasts and destroyed by war, as if to better illuminate our contemporary world. By depicting a modern couple struggling with nature and confronted with violence, he shows us that savagery is always ready to arise in the heart of our civilized lives, like a wolf-dog.
