Sophie Toscan du Plantier’s book about west Cork is a small victory from beyond the grave

Sophie Toscan du Plantier was murdered on the night of December 22nd-23rd, 1996, outside her holiday home in west Cork. Thirty years later she lives on in the memory of those who loved her – her mother, Marguerite Bouniol; her son, Pierre-Louis Baudey-Vignaud; her brothers, Bertrand and Stéphane; her aunt Marie-Madeleine Opalka; her uncle Jean-Pierre Gazeau, and many friends and cousins.

The ferocity of Toscan du Plantier’s murder, her family’s fight for justice, Ireland’s refusal to extradite chief suspect, Ian Bailey, and his eventual trial and conviction in absentia in Paris in 2019 have ensured that the French woman lives on in the collective consciousness in both Ireland and France.

Bailey, the English-born man who was convicted by three French judges of having murdered Toscan du Plantier, died in January 2024. Her father, Georges Bouniol, died the following December at the age of 98. Her widower, the film producer Daniel Toscan du Plantier, died in 2003.

The rest of us grew older. Toscan du Plantier alone remained immutable with her golden hair and dark eyes, smiling in the photographs.

I covered the murder case from start to finish for The Irish Times. Shortly after her death, I sought out the French lawyers who represented her family. But writing about legal procedure and reactions to statements made by Bailey was repetitive and frustrating. It bothered me that his words and actions dominated news coverage. I wanted to know who she was: her thoughts, feelings and personality. I wanted to describe the person whose life had been snuffed out with such unspeakable violence.

I met and interviewed her family members, starting with Marguerite. “I want to talk about her, because I don’t want us to forget her,” she told me of her daughter. To help me write the profile that was published in The Irish Times on the third anniversary of Toscan du Plantier’s death, Marguerite gave me the text of her book. On the title page, Toscan du Plantier wrote L’A de la T, an abbreviation for L’Amour de la Terre, as if her love for the wilds of west Cork was so personal or so intense that she dared not declare it openly. She signed the text with her maiden name, Sophie Bouniol.

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When she was a teenager, she spent two summers in Dublin with a family who took her around Ireland in a caravan. She grew to love the country, and in the early 1990s decided to buy a house there.

Among the documents Marguerite shared with me was her daughter’s house-hunting diary. “Find myself another country, why?” she wrote. “I already have one; but another, so it will be mine, so that I will conquer it, so that we will deserve one another.” She was torn between two properties. “What is my preference?” she wrote, describing contrasting locations. “One in a gentler climate and landscape, and another, less beautiful, more isolated, on the cliffs and rocks, a strong, windy landscape ... Difficult to choose between gentleness and violence.” She reflected that “perhaps my house should not be too isolated”, but nonetheless chose the wilder landscape, “without quite knowing why”.

Her descriptions will be familiar to those who have spent time in the Irish countryside: lambs frolicking in pastures, the bull’s massive neck and low forehead, the “huge, pendulous testicles” hanging between his legs.

She described the heavy fog that blankets west Cork: “Everything stopped, even sound, noises and birdsong. It was as if the air had solidified, as if suddenly the atmosphere contained physical, palpable density. A little fog is all it takes to feel as though you are inside the clouds ... You breathe in suspended water.”

Toscan du Plantier had often visited her mother’s home region, Lozère, in south-central France. Yet she felt her senses had been dulled by living in the city, that her stays in west Cork restored her sight, smell and hearing. “I am truly in a state of bewilderment at discovering the simplest expression of a nature without artifice,” she wrote. “How could I have forgotten it to such an extent? And lived without even missing it?”

Her family likened the house she purchased at Dunmanus West, outside Schull, to a monastery where she led a simple life, going for long walks, reading and writing. She so loved the view of the lighthouse that she had her bed raised on a platform so she could see it from her pillow.

Love of the Land is Sophie Toscan du Plantier’s paean to the sea, sky, wind, rocks, light and colours of west Cork. It is also a premonition of her death there. The tufts of lamb’s wool she picks from a fence prefigure the strands of her own hair that gardaí found on the morning of December 23rd, 1996. It is hard not to see the fox she describes stalking lambs as a precursor to the man who pursued her through the brush below her house that December night.

“It appears that an animal which cannot get back up risks dying within just a few hours,” she wrote of a ewe whose lamb tried to revive its mother.

On one of her walks, she discovered a sheep’s carcass, “the whole scalp of a body” lying on a pathway. “Here, one dies exposed to the wind, the sea, and the earth,” she wrote prophetically.

Marguerite showed me the books her daughter read: Proust and Rimbaud, Brendan Behan and William Butler Yeats. When An Garda Síochána entered Toscan du Plantier’s house after her murder, they found an edition of Yeats’s poetry on her bed, open to a poem entitled Death. It begins, “Nor dread nor hope attend/A dying animal,” and ends, “Man has created death.”

I read Toscan du Plantier’s Love of the Land many times over the years and quoted it in The Irish Times, particularly during Bailey’s trial for her murder. I also quoted it in an interview for the acclaimed West Cork podcast produced by Jennifer Forde and Sam Bungey. The Irish artist Dermot Flynn heard the podcast and asked me for a copy, so he could illustrate it. Marguerite had given me the text with the intention of making it public, so I shared it with him.

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More than three years passed. I had all but forgotten having sent Love of the Land to Flynn. He contacted me again in June this year to say he had been awarded a bursary to the Centre Culturel Irlandais to work on the illustrations. He wanted me to see them. Paris was in the grip of a severe heatwave and I was not eager, but I nonetheless cycled over early one evening to see the illustrations.

I was gobsmacked. Before travelling to Paris to take up the bursary, Flynn spent several days walking through the west Cork landscape which Toscan du Plantier described so eloquently. Images I had carried in my mind for 30 years took form before me, bringing Toscan du Plantier’s text to life. Flynn’s poetic illustrations include fuchsia and gorse, a murmuration of swallows, the view of the lighthouse from Toscan du Plantier’s bed.

The sea in his paintings is as frightening as Toscan du Plantier described it: “Indeed, no one swims in it except tourists in the summer. People look at it from afar ... This land is wary of the sea. Sailor’s vocations are rare in these ports, perhaps because childhoods here are deeply marked by tales of shipwreck and the countless bodies lost to the deep.”

Flynn made real her descriptions of songbirds, ewes and lambs, a bull and cows, the sinister fox who “plunges [one] into his world of stealth”. We see the ruins at Three Castle Head, which Toscan du Plantier described as “the last sentinels holding their ground on this western tip of Europe, facing America directly across the mists, storms and raging fury of the ocean”. Marguerite told me that her daughter walked at Three Castle Head on the last afternoon of her life and was “seized by an incomprehensible anguish”. She arrived at the home of friends “pale, out of breath, panting”. They were the last to see her alive.

Flynn’s illustrations gave me the idea for this book. I narrated a short video of the paintings, which I sent to my dear friend Kathy Gilfillan, a director of the Lilliput Press, suggesting they might publish a bilingual edition of Love of the Land. A few days later, Kathy messaged to say that Lilliput’s board had decided to publish the book posthumously, to mark the 30th anniversary of Toscan du Plantier’s death.

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Marguerite told me she regretted not having recognised her daughter’s literary promise before her death. Toscan du Plantier’s murderer cut short the fulfilment of that promise. Yet these 30 years later, the publication in Ireland, a country she loved, of the text she wrote about west Cork is an affirmation of Toscan du Plantier’s talent, a small victory from beyond the grave.

It is often said that a person dies twice; the first time when the body gives up, the second when they are no longer remembered. By publishing Sophie Toscan du Plantier’s text, the Lilliput Press has ensured her memory will survive a little longer.

This is the foreword to Love of the Land by Sophie Toscan du Plantier, with illustrations by Dermot Flynn, will be published by Lilliput Press on Thursday November 12th