By Nicolas Gubert
Villers-au-Tertre - Eight candles burn on a makeshift altar outside a home in this prim French village - a candle for each of eight babies suffocated by their mother within hours of coming into the world.
"I'm thinking of all the children who didn't ask to be born and were thrown out a few hours later," said local priest Robert Meignotte who placed the candles outside a house in Villers-au-Tertre where the remains were found.
"You don't just throw children out like that in a bin bag. It's incomprehensible," he said.
The priest's shock and disbelief was shared by many in the 620-strong community who speak of the alleged murderer, Dominique Cottrez, and her husband as "nice people, discreet, who never caused any trouble."
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"We're really in a state of shock," said Catherine, who lives in a house across the road from the couple.
"They're people that we like a lot," she said, adding that she had never noticed anything odd about them.
Villers-au-Tertre is a village "where nothing ever happens", said mayor Patrick Mercier.
But on Thursday it was buzzing with police and television crews and reporters who rushed here to report France's worst infanticide case in modern history.
Cottrez, a 45-year-old nursing assistant, was charged with the murders after telling police "she did not want any more children and did not want to see a doctor to get contraception," said a local prosecutor.
Her husband Pierre-Marie Cottrez, also 45, was released without charge after being questioned by police. He denied knowing anything about the murders that took place between 1989 and 2007.
The pair were arrested on Tuesday and questioned all day on Wednesday while police used sniffer dogs to search two addresses after the new owners of a home found the bones of two infants while digging in their garden.
The house previously belonged to the parents of the arrested woman.
Mayor Mercier said he knew Pierre-Marie Cottrez well because he was a long-time elected member of the local council, where he was active on the village festival committee.
He described him as a "respectable" man who appeared to have a solid marriage.
But he said the councillor's wife was a more withdrawn person "who went out very, very little" and rarely took part in village life.
He said she had a weight problem which might be the reason why any pregnancies had passed unnoticed.
The Cottrez couple had lived in the village for 15 years and had two grown-up daughters who have children themselves, local residents said.
A woman who lived near the couple's former home in the village - one of the two spots where the skeletal remains of the babies were found - said: "I think there was a lot of suffering behind all this."
She added that Dominique Cottrez came regularly to nurse her father and that she had always found her to be "a very smiley, very nice lady."
"I just don't get it," she said. - Sapa-AFP
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