The Dutch couple.
They arrived one morning in a large sedan. A Dutch couple—middle-aged, polite, the kind who read every sign and carry their own thermos. It was sometime in the early ’90s, during those strange, brief years when Saint-Mystère began appearing on maps it had never asked to be on.
They walked through the village. Took a photo near the fountain. Had coffee on the terrace, though no one remembers what they were looking for.
By late afternoon, they were gone.
They didn’t stay the night, … they never came back.
But the photo remained—tucked behind a loose board in the café wall. No one knows how it got there. Or why.
In Saint-Mystère, we don’t ask.