I climbed down from the train and found myself in Corbigny; the end of a branch line. Dark; just one track, one light and the station building against which a man leant, smoking a Gitane Mais. He was dressed in blue overalls and beside him was a wooden trolley made of old boxes and bicycle wheels. I was the only person to disembark, so he knew who I was. He threw my case into the handcart and we set off for the big house on the square, where I was to spend the next few months.

Henri Foulet was a wholesale grocer of such evil temper and vicious energy that nobody could work with him; not son nor daughter. I did. I worked seven to seven, seven days a week for seven months. I unloaded lorries, humping sacks on my back. I weighed sugar and salt in kilo bags, washed bottles and barrels and filled them with vinegar. Then once or twice a week I went out on deliveries with Andre the driver, carting orders into the darkest and most remote of the Morvan's grocery shops, those shops that were half cave, half cafe, smelling of saucisson sec and cheese. In the end there was hardly a grocer's in the hills I hadn't drunk rough wine in, raising the cheap glasses and grinning, my teeth stained purple.

I had landed on the first page of a Balzac novel. M Foulet was a hard man and allowed me little rest, but I learnt French and a lot of other things besides. M Foulet had a cellar full of the finest burgundies and he wasn't mean with them. His wife, Marie-Louise, was an exquisite cook and her tomates farcies and her gnocchi are legends even now. After work I could sit and talk to her, quiet in the garden; the gentlest of women, always dressed in a faded wrap-round blue overall and a frayed, wide-brimmed straw hat. When her husband went collecting orders, disappearing for a day, she and I and Andre could spend long idle hours chatting, hours that were made more sweet and precious by the knowledge that before long M Foulet would return from the dark forests of the Morvan, angry, like an avenging god and bent on destroying any vestige of pleasure that might be lingering in his house.

I came to love Corbigny and for a long while it meant all of France to me. It was perfection of a sort, a perfection of that French provincial life which up until then I had only read about or glimpsed in paintings. And the Morvan too had been new; a region within a region, a bit of Burgundy but not Burgundy; defined north and south by two wonderful churches Vezelay and Autun, and in the west by Corbigny, last outpost of the Nivernais; and on the eastern side by Saulieu, looking down into Burgundy proper.

That was 30-odd years ago and nothing much seemed to have changed when I drove into Corbigny last summer. The sun still falls as warmly into the triangular ``square'' in front of the town hall, and there are still 130 shops and businesses for about 1,800 inhabitants. M Foulet's house is empty now, huge and full of ghosts, including his. His daughter took me once more through the high 18th-century rooms and I picked over the debris of a busy life: Marie-Louise's missal, cartons of wooden barrel taps, deck-scrubbers, an old accordion, the boxes of string he made me unravel and the tins of nails he made me straighten. And once again I saw him striding across the yard, in and out between the stacked crates of empty bleach bottles, his long dust coat floating behind him, held in the air by the speed of his movement, hunting me to work ``C'est pas comme ca, mon pauvre Michel, c'est pas comme ca.'' And I am sure that Marie-Louise was still hiding in the garden, hands in the soil, with the broad brim of her hat tilting so that I might see her smile as she raised her eyes to heaven.

Beyond Corbigny, out on the rolling plains of the Nivernais and along the edges of the Morvan itself, great regiments of sunflowers quartered the landscape, sharing the space with empty wheatfields, all burning hot in yellow dust with the huge circular bales of straw rolled carelessly here and there. On the hills were wooded knolls, and crickets and cicadas made the quiet roads noisy. High up, from the terrace by the church at Lormes for example, the countryside looked like the top of a cake, laid out with care and good enough to eat in green and yellow marzipan.

Up in the heart of the Morvan it is different. The woods and forests bend thick over the roads and keep them more cold than cool. And the country is all laced with dark fast rivers where the libellules the dragonflies fly greener than the sunlit leaves and more sapphire than the stones themselves.

Agriculturally the Morvan has always been a poor place, an area of small farms where the ground was not rich and the main employment for a woman was as a wet nurse. For the men there was logging, supplying timber to Paris, 500,000 stere annually, all floated down the rivers: the Chalaux and the Cousin flowing into the Cure, the Cure into the Yonne and the Yonne into the Seine. Then dams were built to control the flow of the waters and so the lakes came: Pannesiere, the Chaumecon, the Lac de Crescent and the Lac des Settons, this last being the favourite of the tourist.

Yet even in high season at Les Settons there was room to breathe and I had no feeling of crowds around me. There was space under the stands of pine and silver birch, and sand and turf to lie on. A few pedalos drifted by, but most were moored to the shore, and the girl who hired them out read her book steadily through the afternoon. ``The French don't come to the Morvan,'' said a Dutchman, and smiled craftily as if this one sentence explained why he did.

The next day I went to Pannesiere and had a lake to myself with empty woods to walk in, leading me down to the water's edge and little crescent beaches. Eventually I did discover someone else; a man fishing while his women sat a respectful three yards away, knitting and nattering Madame Defarge and her sister on holiday. And two lovers, who had been invisible, arose from the sand, still entwined in each other's sleep, and walked into the water till it was up to their shoulders, standing close together a whole lake to fondle in.

On the small and quiet roads driving remains a pleasure, motoring as they did in the 1930s with a trunk on a grid at the back; grass growing up through the thin Tarmac, the pink gravel of the Morvan speckled gold and green as the sun rises, and the swallows skimming along beside the car like dolphins playing alongside a boat at sea. Some of the signposts I saw were the old ones, enamelled in white and blue, and in the hamlets the old men sat against the warm walls, their skinny limbs still draped in the overalls of their working life. They sat gazing at their winter's wood, piled high and straight, wondering if there was enough for the cold months, or thinking maybe they'd cut too much for the time they had left. And the next day they sat in the same place, nor had the hens moved, and only the ears twitching on the dog told me it wasn't a discarded carpet.

In the church of St-Pere, restful after the sun, the picnic and the burgundy, the nave and the side aisles were white and cool and lines of straw-bottomed chairs caught the light from the galleries and made it yellow. There were only five tourists present and two girls selling tickets for a concert. The pianist Claude Kahn, the poster said, was rehearsing Schumann, Chopin and Liszt. That afternoon he played just for me, and his assistant moved about the church on tip-toe, testing the acoustics. ``Le do est un peu dur,'' he said.