CHÉRENCE, FRANCE — A French expression has it that “On est à l’abri nulle part” — roughly, “there is no shelter anywhere.”

This village an hour’s drive west down the Seine from Paris, with its 11th-century Romanesque church, its cluster of limestone houses, its 150 inhabitants and its central patch of gravel for the obligatory boules, seems the image of an unchanging France set apart from any storm. A bronze bell cast in 1591 tolls the hours. Little happens to distinguish them.

A less likely candidate for bloodshed is hard to imagine.
Or so it seemed. Then, on April 8, Easter day, Chérence awoke to murder most foul: a 22-year-old woman bludgeoned to death in a small house beside the boules terrain, her head split open by a tremendous blow as she clutched her baby boy. Police and forensic experts were everywhere. Fear spread and rumor with it.

I knew the victim, Maëva Rousseau, a little. Part of her responsibility as minder of the rural association was to oversee the tennis court (and the boules). She would hand me the key to the court; we’d chat a little. She seemed happy holding little Lorenzo. Her partner, Alan, was a waiter. The night of the murder he was working late at the Moulin de Fourges, a nearby restaurant of some renown, where Hillary Clinton once dined on lobster salad and loin of lamb.

In the weeks after the crime theories multiplied. Her killing must be the work of a sadistic madman on the loose in the villages of the Vexin. No, drugs were involved, an unpaid debt, a settling of scores. Wrong! Maëva had been the victim of a crime of passion, the target of the jealous rage of a former boyfriend or his family.

As residents voted at the town hall in France’s May presidential election, they were concerned less with politics than murder scenarios. At night they bolted their doors. They wondered. The village, infected by a savage act, was changed, not utterly, but some.

“You see, we’d never known anything like this,” said Roger Gasse, who has lived in Chérence 80 years.

Write the truth, people tell journalists, as if that were simple. Why don’t you just write the truth? That should be straightforward enough in a French village of 150 souls where everyone knows everyone and hardly a car passes. Jerusalem this is not. How many truths can there be when hardly anything happens?

But even now, more than three months after the murder, accounts of Maëva’s death multiply. Every conflict is fought over memory precisely because memories, being shifting, being alive, seldom coincide. It is said she was not bludgeoned but shot. That she was found on her bed, or on the floor, or in a cellar. That the weapon (not found) was a baseball bat or a hammer. That Maëva’s ex-boyfriend, Rodolphe Berruet, was killed last year in an auto accident, or a motorcycle accident, and that this happened after he met with Maëva or, no, after he had a fight with his then girlfriend, Christelle, who was angry about his obsession with Maëva.

A few weeks ago, police arrested Rodolphe Berruet’s father for what seems to have been a crime of crazed vengeance.

This much is clear: On Aug. 21, 2011, Rodolphe Berruet, who had been Maëva’s high-school boyfriend in the depressed nearby town of Bray-et-Lû, was killed when he crashed his Peugeot 407 on a country road. He had been texting Maëva, telling her about his enduring passion. Maëva’s partner, Alan, was infuriated. He showed the texts to Rodolphe’s girlfriend: jealous scenes, drink and a car out of control.

Rodolphe’s father, a craftsman named Alain Berruet (and close friend of Maëva’s father), could not get over his son’s death. He told the mayor of Bray-et-Lû he was hearing voices from the grave, which he insisted should be reopened. He blamed Maëva for his son’s death and, it seems, threatened her in phone messages. She would suffer as his son had suffered.

Just after midnight, on April 8, according to police charges, Alain Berruet broke into Maëva’s house in the middle of Chérence, beside the rural association where residents gather on Bastille Day and prizes are handed to the winners of the boules competition. He killed the young woman with a blow to her head. Her 13-month-old son, Lorenzo, was found by Alan on his return from work, his left arm caught beneath his mother’s corpse. The baby survived.

There are rumors now that Berruet is from a Gypsy, or Roma, family and that the murder was an honor killing, an act of tribal retribution for which Chérence happened to be the setting even though none of those involved came from here.

But then Chérence is full of people who did not come from here. It is less static than it seems and less immune from its surroundings.

Come to think of it, that French expression — “On est à l’abri nulle part” — or, roughly, “no place is a safe haven” — is not a bad one for these times.