Sitting under the magnificent pergola of sophisticated Dutch friends who divide their time between France and their long-time home in America, I casually asked: 'What's new?'

Frankly I was expecting political tales from America, hopefully a bit of gossip about expats locally whom I no longer see (or rather who no longer see me) or maybe some new restaurant that's passed me by.

"Well, we'd gone home before the stabbing at the fete," said M, spearing a baby tomato with a cocktail stick in one deft movement as mine skittered all over the place.

"Just missed the aorta," added F, as his stick captured a cornichon plus a chunk of ham. "Not good."

My final stab at the tomato was abandoned and cocktail stick snapped.

Excuse me? Run that past me again please – stabbing, less than eight kms from me, three weeks earlier, and I knew nothing?

Knowing I am a reporter extraordinaire, a sniffer of truth and dastardly deeds in my sleep, they looked at me with some astonishment.

"Oh, didn't you know?"

With the tight smile of the uninformed I asked for details. They were sketchy but involved an early-hour-of-the-morning altercation between two men over a rugby team top worn by one of them.

A knife was pulled and plunged into the chest. One man was in jail, the other recovering after a week in hospital.

For those of us used to big city life the "spat" would be barely worth a three-par mention in the papers.

But this happened in a village – more of a hamlet really – miles from any trouble spots and during its midsummer festivities attended by every soul in the parish.

Barring wars, each year the people gather to share food, wine, light the pagan bonfire of renewal, and then dance joyfully until the dawn breaks.

When the meal is ended, young people arriving for the dancing only, unable or unwilling to pay for the repas, usually swell the numbers.

They shuffle sheepishly in, politely greeting with the double kiss elderly neighbours, parents and friends. Once they would have been young farmworkers from far and wide, excited at the break in their lives of drudgery.

There are few farm boys left now. Indeed, few small farms, as the youth disdain generations of being bred for the land.

Now, increasingly, it's the restless, the bored, who travel to seek out fetes and free wine to pass a night away.

So it was, as I discovered, that a group – not known to anyone – came, already half-cut from a small town some 20 or so kilometres distance.

At first they just nosily bumbled around the dance floor, circling the girls who danced in a world of their own.

Roslyn – ah yes, even she was there and hadn't told me – set the scene.

"There was one very large man, boy really, who was pretty drunk. He bumped into J and something was said about the team top he was wearing.

"The next thing he pulled out a knife. In and out. J dropped to the floor. The boy and his friends scattered for their cars but the men chased them and caught him. They gave him a good battering to keep him quiet for the gendarmes."

The attacker, of course, was a gitane, a gypsy. All crimes in France are apparently committed by gitanes. If not gitanes then by North Africans. The "pure" French of course do not do such things. Such is the myth.

Before Roslyn had given me the details, I asked an English friend who'd been there why she hadn't mentioned the knifing.

"We don't want people knowing, do we?" She said, somewhat bizarrely. "It's not fair. It was a lovely night otherwise. Anyway it was in the local paper."

I searched their archives on line. There was a glowing report of the fete, the fireworks, the dancing and, buried three quarters of the way down, a two-line mention of a knife "incident".

Its placing in the story was intentional and not merely incompetent reporting. It had to be acknowledged, but barely. I would have preferred it to be the stupidity of an amateur local correspondent.

For it is not only the incomers who want to believe they have found a place untouched by the coarse realities of modern life; a place wrapped in a simpler package of outward courtesy and inner unchanging values.

The locals too want to foster that image both for themselves and us.

I have a theory. At the mercy of nature, as witnessed in the spring storms and floods that set back or destroyed crops, they cannot condone being at the mercy of other human beings as well.

So it is important to, at first, distance troublemakers – label them gitanes – and after, ignore what happened. Perhaps life can then return to normal.

For the wounded man it so far hasn't. He has become obsessive about bolting his shutters, checking his young children, scanning the fields outside as night falls.

He has no memory of the actual event; of whispering he was dying.

Or, at least that is what he says.