Between summer fetes and the full winter lock-down there is a strange, uneasy, sombre period in rural France.

Perhaps it's the combination of the dying of the last flowers, the wind stripping the trees, and the brutal pollarding of growth in village or town, or perhaps it's the boarded fronts of the summer-only cafes and craft shops.

That physical awareness of melancholia is also manifest in the commemoration of the dead that began with November.

The traditional huge pots of chrysanthemums brought to the cemeteries over Toussaint, All Saints Day, are already wilting, as are the fresh flowers placed by war memorials in every village or hamlet.

The old men bearing tattering tricolors have shuffled back to winter oblivion: sons of the fallen, the last direct connection with the often-secretive local war history.

No doubt they wonder if they'll be here to bear witness once more next year.

The farmers slow down their pace as the fields are already greening with the fast-growing early rape that has been sown all around me this year.

Other fields lie fallow for now until the spring, sepia snapshots blackened by the cut stalks of the sunflowers ruined by the late summer's arrival. This being France, my neighbours get "weather compensation" with a hefty reduction in tax.

Meanwhile they rise early to catch the dawn when they can start hunting, and it's an almost primeval experience to stand in the thick mist and hear the nearby baying of the hounds. Occasionally, on a big hunt, the horns add to the mournful sense of detachment from the outside world.

The days end with the call home to the animals and the early valley mist is replaced by the drifting sweet scent of woodsmoke as wood-burners come to life again.

It was mere coincidence that I found myself rereading Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovski - the unfinished fictional testament to the Second World War by an author destined to be gassed at Auschwitz.

No other book, I suggest, brings the reader so intimately into life in rural France after the country's fall to the Nazis.

One's heart is gripped with empathic fear; one hears the doors lock on the refugees from Paris who flee south in hope of sanctuary. She wrote, of course, contemporaneously.

And as the book runs from summer to winter, as betrayal and kind acts vie with each other, the descriptions of the villagers who peer through shutters and net curtains is all the more intensified by reading it, if you like, in situ.

She lays bare the pettiness and the selfish insularity of locals whose worst and best traits come to the fore as they accept their fate in the new order.

Townhouses and farms are drawn with a loving pen. Nature's retreat into winter, unheeding of all desecrating it, is pin-pointed with poignant clarity as if remembering it for the very last time; which of course she was.

In architectural terms little has changed in the villages around here.

Nemirovski would recognise her own descriptions today, down to twitching net curtains and the glowers at strangers in the street.

She would certainly feel that melancholic going into the dark winter and note the little changing rituals of farming life. Would she, I wonder, spot the added uneasiness there seems to be this year?

Shocking surveys seem to show a belief that racism is rife in France. Anti-semitic and Islamophobic incidents are on the rise and distinguished journalists and intellectuals have taken to newspapers to argue and counter-argue that racism is an inherently dangerous aspect of the French psyche.

France's deeply unpopular President Francois Hollande was heckled and booed during the Armistice Day commemoration and 70 protesters against government policies were arrested.

It was an unprecedented disruption of a ceremony taken enormously seriously in a country that has seen so much blood shed on its own soil.

In the rest of France demonstrations involving Bretons, eco-tax, business interests and teachers have flared into violence, verging on national disobedience.

Yes, the French take to the streets at the slightest provocation and, having made their protest, normally wander home happy again.

But this time, this month, there is a sense of common anger among many disparate groups, and always, waiting on the sidelines, is the Front National and Marine Le Pen.

Perhaps my November melancholia is heightened by a genuine apprehension of this woman's potential to woo my rural neighbours, if she fails to take the cities. Fear is too glib a word to use, particularly after time spent with Irene Nemirovsky, so apprehension will for now describe what I sense.

It's interesting how being in a country so blighted by war can make one feel rawly conscious of the shifting political sands, more acutely aware of old enmities rising when times get tough and blame has to ascribed to some one, some race.

As I began - this is the strange, uneasy, sombre period. Hopefully, that's all it is, nothing more.