1 The Priest's Children CAHORS, IN SOUTH-WEST FRANCE, the Darquiers' native town, is built on a loop in the River Lot, and boasts monuments and buildings, bridges and churches of great beauty, strong red wine, plump geese and famous sons, one of whom was the great hero of the Third Republic, LÉon Gambetta, after whom the main boulevard and the ancient school of Cahors are named. It is an amiable, sturdy, provincial place, with the windy beauty of so many southern French towns, dominated by its perfect medieval Pont ValentrÉ and its Romanesque fortress of a cathedral, the massive CathÉdrale de St-Étienne. Cahors was the capital of the ancient region of Quercy, whose many rivers cut through great valleys and hills, patched with limestone plateaux, grottos and cascades. In medieval times Cahors was a flourishing city of great bankers who funded the popes and kings, but up to the Wars of Religion in the sixteenth century Quercy was also an explosive region of great violence, one explanation perhaps for the cautious politics of its citizens - Cadurciens - in the centuries that followed. Quercy reflected an important fissure in the French body politic, in the rivalry that existed between Cahors - fiercely Catholic during the Wars of Religion, when its leaders massacred the Protestants of the town - and its southern neighbour, the more prosperous town of Montauban, a Protestant stronghold. But under Napoleon Cahors became the administrative centre of the new department of the Lot, Montauban of the Tarn-et-Garonne. (The rivalry continued: when the Vichy state came to power in 1940, and wanted to work with the Nazis to control its Jewish population, the two Frenchmen who managed much of this process were Louis Darquier of Cahors, Commissioner for Jewish Affairs, and RenÉ Bousquet of Montauban, Secretary-General for the Police.) In the late nineteenth century the Lot was a poor agricultural department, covered with vineyards large and small, a place where 'notables' - the elite bourgeoisie - reigned supreme, looking after a rural community who worked a hard land.

The Lot was modestly revolutionary after 1789, restively Napoleonic under Napoleon, imperially Bonapartiste in the time of Louis Napoleon, warily republican after 1870. By 1890 the department had become solidly republican, and remained thus ever afterwards. Isolated from the political sophistications and turmoils of Paris, the Lot turned its face towards Toulouse, a hundred kilometres or so to the south. The Lotois were conformists, but they were individualists and pragmatists. The scandalised clergy of the Lot watched as their congregations went to Mass on Sundays and holidays, while regularly voting for the godless republic and indulging in the 'murderous practice' of birth control for the rest of the week. The Lot stood out in the south-west for this singularity: nearby Aveyron remained fervently Catholic; other neighbouring regions veered to the left and distanced themselves from the Church. In Cahors 'On allait À l'Église mais on votait À gauche'; they went to church but they voted for the left - piety on Sundays and holy days, anticlerical the rest of the week. The Lot remained faithful to both republic and Church, on its own terms.

But in 1877 the vineyards which provided so much of its prosperity were destroyed by phylloxera, and so began a long decline, as the Lotois left to find work in the cities. *** For the first half of his life Louis Darquier's father, Pierre, was a fortunate man. He was born at a propitious time, he married a wealthy wife who loved him, and he had three handsome and intelligent sons, and at least one other child born out of wedlock. He was a good doctor, and almost everyone who knew him spoke well of him and remembered him fondly. Born in 1869, he was only a year old when the last of the French emperors, Louis Napoleon, Napoleon III, made the mistake of attackin.