One story is set at the Vauxbelets around 1850. Marie Pipet came into the kitchen of Mr Fred Mansell, a Jurat of the Royal Court, and asked for something that was refused. "Tu t'en repentiras", she said, and went and sat on the hedge outside to wait. For hours afterwards the cook turned the sirloin for Mr Mansell's dinner in front of the fire and it stayed raw. The cook went to her master. He sent for Marie and told her she would spend the night in gaol if she did not free his dinner. She curtsied and said that if he went into the kitchen he would find it ready, and at that moment, the cook swore, it turned brown.
At the King's Mills, Les Grands Moulins, two young millers refused to grind her corn. After she went home the millstones spun so fast that no corn would grind and nothing would stop them, until they called her back and promised to do her corn. George Métivier, writing earlier in the century, called her "the incomparable Marie, so dreaded by the millers of the King's Mills". He said she was believed to take the shape of a cahouette, the red-legged chough. A farmer found such a bird in his cow stable and ran it through the thigh with a pitchfork. It escaped, and Marie Pipet then spent six months in bed with a mysterious wound in her leg. An old woman at St Pierre du Bois said Marie stopped her grandmother's cows eating when she was refused milk, and her grandfather cured them by going to her with a pitchfork and threatening her. Another story says she made a man who offended her walk back and forth all night between the Vauxbelets and St Andrew's Church.
Métivier noted that despite all this she was buried on "the good side", the south side, of the Castel churchyard, not on the north side kept for suicides and criminals. Carey added that in her own time country people still had "a great dread of Les Pipiaux". The Pipets were real people, and much of their reputation seems to have grown from being poor, different and excluded. The map point here is approximate, at St Andrew's Church, because the lane to their Le Hurel is not identified precisely.
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