We study the energy and intensity dependence of the dephasing
time T2 of the polarization in CuCl inside an excitonic
resonance by a femtosecond four-wave mixing technique at 5 K.
We first compare results obtained on bulk material and on
epitaxial films of different thicknesses for a backward-scattering
configuration. This configuration is most sensitive
to the region close to the surface of the samples. In bulk
material, the coherence properties of the polarization are
mainly limited by recombination processes and scattering with
acoustic phonons while they are in addition influenced by
scattering with impurities and/or imperfections in the epitaxial
films. In these films, in a transmission configuration, the
polarization dephases less rapidly than it appears in
retrodiffusion, indicating the importance of surface
recombination processes and of the polariton propagation.