Country France in the 19th Century is a world of intrigue where the lives of women and girls are cheap, and paintings of green horses have the ability to make social observations and commentaries.
A fine yarn by the pen-master Aymé of the life in the village of Claquebue from the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 and the following generation. War brings pillage and rape, which bounds two families in the village into a generational hatred.
As the green mare muses, she believes that houses and the families who live in them have a different gender, they then select other houses and families to dominate or submit, which explains all the events “dans la campagne” following the end of the 1870 war. A real insight into a now vanished world.