‘I’m told that in Paris, with all the factories closing, there isn’t such a shortage of men. That a day labourer working for three francs would largely prefer to be a substitute . . .’
‘Oh, is that right? They told you that? Well then, if it’s that easy, why don’t you go find yourself a worker who feels like getting killed in your place?’
‘My father will never pay that amount,’ said Auguste, his face buried in his fine, girlish hands. ‘He has made provision for 10,000 francs for an impeccable recruit,’ he added in a whisper.
He turned on his best puppy-dog eyes – more mortally-wounded-deer – but though this worked so well on his mother it served only to make the horse trader laugh.
‘Seems to me life in the barracks won’t be such a walk in the park the way you’re carrying on like a witless girl. But what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, so they say!’
After swallowing his last mouthful of sausage, Anquetin wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve and tossed off some final advice to Auguste with a malicious smirk.
‘Careful on your way home. They say the neighbourhood isn’t safe.’
3
THE FIRST DAY OF APRIL, eighteen hundred and seventy-one at half past four in the afternoon.
The birth of Renan Astyanax de Rigny, of male sex, at the domicile of Clothilde de Rigny, at 43 Rue du 4 September, to Auguste de Rigny, student, of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, aged twenty-one years, son of Casimir de Rigny, and to Corentine Malgorn, farmer, of Brest, aged twenty years, daughter of Yann Malgorn, is hereby formally declared and acknowledged. This declaration is read aloud by the child’s father and mother before Aimé Perrachon, student, aged twenty-two years, residing at 10 Rue du Port Mahon, Paris, and Albert Trousselier, aged twenty-three years, residing at 8 Boulevard de la Madeleine, Paris, witnesses by their signature to the said declaration, and in the presence of myself, the undersigned Civil Registrar.
My forebears Renan, Corentine, Auguste and Casimir, Auguste’s university friends Perrachon and Trousselier, Clothilde de Rigny, the aunt in Paris who had taken him in . . . With its restrained vocabulary and basic syntax, there was no better stylistic form in the world for setting out the contents of this formal document written in pen and ink.
Let’s pick up the thread again, paying close attention.
Like so many other penniless women from Brittany, my great-grandmother, Corentine, would have taken advantage of the railways opening up the region and headed to the capital to seek work as a maid. She would have been taken into service by a wealthy bourgeois family, where she would have been impregnated by one of the male line, most likely the boy closest in age, Auguste. He would have taken her to his single aunt so she could give birth in the coolest neighbourhood of Haussmann’s Paris, the Grands Boulevards, or in other words to his aunt from the beautiful people set. He would have formally recognised the child with his uni mates as witnesses and would certainly have given him the Breton first name Renan, but also the revolutionary, impossible-to-pronounce name of Astyanax, meaning protector of the city in Ancient Greek. Having delivered her child into the world, she appears to have opened a restaurant that same year . . . And all this in the middle of the Prussian occupation and against the backdrop of the crushing of the Paris Commune.
That is what I took from that old birth certificate.
Let me rephrase it for you . . .
You’ll admit, the story I’d been served up didn’t hold water for a second. And no need for a doctor of letters to work that out; you just needed to have read Zola’s Pot-Bouille:
So, it wasn’t enough never to be able to eat her fill, to be the filthy, clumsy slattern, the subject of constant abuse by the entire household: the masters of the house then had to goand fix her up with a child! Ah! The bastards! Except that she could not have said whether it was the younger or the elder of them, because the old man had forced himself on her again the night of Shrove Tuesday. In any event, neither of them could have cared less, now they had taken their pleasure and she was left with the pain!
The author then recounts the young maid giving birth with the same clinical attention to detail he might have used to describe an animal dropping its offspring.
She gives birth in her room under the eaves, alone and silently, for fear of being turned out of the house, and abandons her infant on the ground in the covered arcade of the Passage Choiseul, pleased to have had some good fortune for once in that nobody saw her do it . . . And there you have the condition of maidservants in the nineteenth century. But never, ever would you flout the law of reproduction within one’s social class. And yet Auguste de Rigny had committed this ultimate transgression on 1 April 1871 by recognising my grandfather and, moreover, by choosing that first name – because I really can’t see a girl from my island in Brittany calling her son Astyanax.
Why did he do it? Was he trying to make amends for something, to make good a debt? Was it a political gesture? Could it have been all of the above?
And that wasn’t all. Here you have a Catholic girl from Brittany, and supposedly a poverty-stricken one at that, who travelled a great distance from home to earn a living, who opened up a restaurant by the name of The Greedy Seagull the same year as the birth of her bastard son . . . What money would she have had to invest in such a business, which was, if one were to believe the postcard Granny Soize showed me, quite a decent size? And finally, why did she feature on my grandfather’s birth certificate as a farmer and not as a maid?
In that photo, which was dated 1875, Corentine appeared dressed to the same high standards as she was fifty years later in the portrait adorning her family vault: that is, impeccably styled and cinched into her stays. Even at that young age, she had the air of a triumphant businesswoman. It was hard to imagine her ever being in somebody else’s service.
The explanations provided to me by my family made the whole story seem like a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces had been jammed in with a hammer: it made no sense. My head, or rather, my imagination, craved more. I told myself it was far from a coincidence that those Parisians had come to drown their teddy bears on our island in memory of a de Rigny; it was like some sort of unacknowledged truth that had simply been biding its time before exploding . . .
In the train on the way home, thanks to the Mormon website familysearch.com, which has been relentlessly scanning parish registers from around the world since the 1960s in order to baptise the dead, I was able to reconstitute the de Rigny family tree in exchange for a few euros and a couple of clicks.
At its base, I put Casimir, the father of Auguste, who was the one who had acknowledged my grandfather, the war cripple. Casimir had produced three children, Berthe, Ferdinand – and the infamous Auguste. Berthe had not had any children, but Ferdinand had had four: one girl and three boys. It seems the women in the de Rigny family suffered genetic issues relating to childbirth, because Berthe was not the only one without any offspring; her niece Agnès, Ferdinand’s daughter, had registered the stillbirths of five children in the parish of Saint-Germain-de-Paris. Of Ferdinand’s three sons, two had died young during the Great War, one in 1916 and the other in 1917, without offspring. Only the last baby, Guillaume de Rigny, born in 1905, had survived. He had married a younger woman, Yvonne, who had given birth in about 1945 to our friend Philippe, otherwise known as the Super Prick, and then to twins Pierre and Marianne. Philippe had two children, Marianne one and Pierre none. I didn’t discover anything else regarding my putative great-grandfather Auguste. Nothing more about the son he had formally recognised on the official certificate I had in my possession, which seemed understandable given that the Communards had torched all the Parisian records of births, deaths and marriages that had been held at the Town Hall since the sixteenth century, as well as the duplicate records archived at Avenue Victoria; a political gesture intended to create a tabula rasa of bourgeois lines of descent and heredity. Nor was there any further mention of the date or place of his death which might have enlightened me as to his fate.