[1] Towards the end of the nineteenth century, in the rural village of La Folie in France's Loire Valley, a girl is born with a birthmark on her face shaped like a dancing hare.

After both her parents die young, Charlotte is raised by her uncle, a mild-mannered gardener with a stutter, and her aunt, a strict disciplinarian who regards her niece's birthmark as the brand of Satan.

The village of La Folie is based on Le Puy-Notre-Dame, in the Maine-et-Loire department, where Rikki Ducornet lived with her French husband for twenty years.

The book was written in Le Puy, and Ducornet has described the book's genesis as stemming from a dream fuelled by encounters with real people in the village: The Stain got kicked off when I came to know an old woman who was the only one who didn’t have a washing machine; she was still going down to the “lavoir” to do her laundry, and I would go there too, because there were a lot of insects to watch and frogs and other creatures, and we would talk about the past.

After that conversation, I took my bike on a wonderful ride through the vineyards, quite far from the village; as I was returning, the sun was setting, and I saw this creature bounding across a meadow.