THE GENDARMES, undertaker and mayor arrived at the cemetery of Combret, population several dozen, at dawn, writes Lara Marlowe.
After chasing away an Irish journalist who had waited all night for the exhumation, they hung green tarpaulins around the cemetery walls "to protect her from prying eyes", in the words of Jean-Pierre Deltour (70), the mayor of neighbouring Saint-Germain du Teil.
The grey marble slab over the Bouniol family crypt was pulled aside. The undertaker, who had already moved the body of Sophie Toscan du Plantier in the autumn of 2004, descended through a trapdoor into the crypt, then loaded the lead casket into a mortuary vehicle for the seven-hour journey north to the Institut Medico-Lagal in Paris. The slab was put back into place and sealed with silicon.
The undertaker's presence was a comfort to the murder victim's mother, Marguerite Bouniol. "We trust him. He knew where he'd put her in the crypt. There was no danger he would mix up the coffins," she said yesterday.
When Ms Toscan du Plantier was murdered in Ireland in December 1996, her husband Daniel wanted her to be buried near their country home at Ambax, where he had purchased plots for himself and Sophie. But Daniel remarried, and when he died in 2003, his new wife buried him instead in Paris.
It was a hardship for Georges and Marguerite Bouniol to travel so far, so they brought their dead daughter to Combret, the tiny village where Georges was born, and where Sophie spent her holidays as a child.
When Ms Toscan du Plantier bought her home in west Cork, she said it reminded her of Combret.
"You understand, nobody would have gone to see her in Ambax; she would have been abandoned. In Combret, she's with her grandparents," Mrs Bouniol said.
Still haunted by the thought of abandoning her dead daughter, she had wanted to be in the little cemetery yesterday morning "to be near Sophie", but Sophie's father said it would be too painful.
The ageing couple went instead to friends in the hills above the Cote d'Azur. "I felt I let her down," Mrs Bouniol lamented. "My sister Marie-Madeleine cried and cried. She told me Sophie isn't there, that it's just an envelope, that she's in the air, everywhere. Still, I want to be there when they rebury her, waiting with flowers. I know it's not her any more, but you can't help hanging on to something."
Yesterday's exhumation was the result of nearly 12 years of attempts by the Bouniols to force the French and Irish justice systems to act.
A month ago, Judge Patrick Gachon called the Bouniols to tell them he had ordered their daughter's exhumation, because the Irish autopsy report they had finally received did not include the results of forensic examinations.
"Georges and I were very upset. We were sick all day," Mrs Bouniol said. "We asked him if we could cancel it, and he said no, it was a decision of justice."
Mrs Bouniol has enlisted the support of numerous influential French people, including former ministers of culture and justice, the heads of Arte television station and France Culture radio and the president of the Cannes Film Festival. One sponsor is a counsel to the prosecution at France's Supreme Court, and is a close friend of Jacques Barrot, the European commissioner for justice and the vice-president of the commission.
Mrs Bouniol's brother Jean-Pierre Gazeau heads an association that campaigns for the truth about Ms Toscan du Plantier's murder. He was optimistic the exhumation might yield the DNA of her killer.
"It's very important for us to put pressure on the authorities, to put them on the spot," he said. "I think the exhumation has triggered something."