The same time, the same year, but in a kingdom far from Cuenca, Edmond Nerval married a local peasant girl, Jamette. Unlike Albornoz, Edmond came from a poor family for whom religion played little part. On the contrary, the boy’s father set greater store by myths and fables, recounted by travellers and soothsayers in a language he understood, than by men dressed in long black robes, waving a shiny cross and mumbling that ‘Father did this’ or ‘Father says the other.’
They lived in a one-room wooden cabin with a turf roof in a forest to the north of Limoges, down a winding track hardly wide enough to take a cart. Few people called on them, and Edmond preferred it that way. He was by nature a solitary soul and suspicious of strangers who might leap out from behind a tree and rob him of his m
