To Auguste’s branch, then, I added the little limb which History had forgotten: us, the nobodies from Brittany, adding a pretty little flower at the end for my daughter, Juliette.
With the branch of Alice de Rigny – the innocent tourist – having been snapped off by the hand of nature’s fury, I was struck by the scarcity of vegetation on that side. It consisted of only six people: Yvonne de Rigny née Guyot, born 1921, who, as you might say, had one foot in the grave and the other slipping in, her son Philippe and her daughter Marianne, both divorced, as well as their children, who were about my age, all born in the ’80s. None of them had married nor had any children. Then there was Pierre, Marianne’s twin, who also hadn’t married or had any children.
It was the sort of tortured, sickly tree you find growing in barren soil.
In a few minutes I had identified almost all of them. There was the exquisitely wealthy centenarian maintaining her daughter Marianne and her granddaughter Adrienne, a jet-setting art photographer who, judging by her social media pages, appeared to be constantly coked up, wearing hyper-branded threads, and very, very stupid. In the Super Prick’s family, leaving aside the dead girlfriend, there was the father as well as the son, Pierre-Alexandre, both of them working for Oilofina and under investigation before the courts in the matter concerning the contamination of African waste sites, Pierre-Alexandre being recently resident in the Abidjan prison, Maca. Only Pierre eluded my investigative efforts, as I was unable to find the slightest trace of him on the internet.
The family owned numerous properties and a very luxurious 35-metre yacht, the Sunday Morning, whose every angle could be admired on photographer Adrienne’s Instagram account, which featured some very fancy parties. When you scrolled through her photos, you could see the whole family took advantage of it, or had at some point, even the dead girlfriend . . . And even the hipster dude with glasses whom I’d met, pissed, at the Kastel Bar – who, despite his left-leaning politics and his humanitarian aid work, nonetheless seemed right at home. Only Marianne, Adrienne’s mother, caught in the background of those few shots, gazing into the distance through her squinting alcoholic’s eyes, didn’t really seem to be enjoying herself.
Paris
14 July 1870
For the second time that day Auguste had rushed to the newspaper stand at the end of his street, directly opposite the building site of the new Opera, in order to stay abreast of the latest developments in the saga of the Spanish throne and its corollary: war.
Forty-eight hours earlier, to appease France’s fears of being encircled by Prussian monarchies, Kaiser Wilhelm I, who was taking the waters at Ems, had given his assurance in reply to the enquiry of the French Ambassador that his cousin, Prince Leopold of the House of Hohenzollern, would once and for all be withdrawing his claim to the throne.
Auguste had breathed again as he saw the spectre of conflict between France and Prussia dissipating.
But the nationalist press, with its bellicose pontificating, was pushing the Chamber to call for more: namely, that Wilhelm I go further and promise there would never be any other Prussian candidate. The Kaiser had replied that no further promises would be offered to anybody and that the matter of the Spanish throne was closed. However, the Ambassador had requested a new audience to seek such an undertaking. He had even gone so far as to pursue him on his morning promenade within the palace grounds. A magnificent caricature of this incident, portraying him abjectly tugging at the Kaiser’s sleeve, appeared in the German press on the same afternoon of 13 July. The Ambassador had simultaneously sent a dispatch to Paris from the town of Ems in which he related this disagreeable affair. In it, he described how he, a close friend of Napoléon III, and France’s representative, had been sent on his way like some nobody by a mere aide-de-camp, when he had simply come to put a perfectly legitimate request to the king of Prussia.
The previous evening, talk in the French newspapers had been of nothing but that dispatch, some declaring that war was the only solution to avenge the affront, others reporting that the worst had been averted, that all would be well and that the stock exchange had risen three points.
Leaning out of the window of his aunt’s apartment, Auguste had seen his street invaded by hordes of students and workers yelling Down with Prussia! To Berlin! at the top of their lungs, and brandishing tricolour flags.
By nightfall, all Paris was out in the boulevards. Handkerchiefs were fluttering from windows and balconies everywhere, urging the demonstrators on. By morning, the streets had still not emptied and the country was unanimous in its desire to avenge the insult suffered by the French Ambassador.
By five o’clock that evening, the headlines of the dailies were of one voice when it came to the war – even Le Figaro, which described how the stock exchange had plunged since it opened . . . And on top of all that, there had been no further news from his brother-in-law Jules since the latter had left for Brest to buy him a man. The recruitment board was meeting on the 18th; he had a mere four days left!
His friend Trousselier had managed to lay his hands on a booklet that was circulating illicitly at the faculty of medicine: The Health Officers’ Guide to Assessing Disabilities or Illnesses Rendering a Man Unfit for Military Service.
‘Take a look at it, maybe you’ll find a way of getting yourself out of this mess,’ he had said to him, offering him a little bit of hope.
Its introduction explained that the army, as a result of the exhaustion, privations and dangers to which it would subject future soldiers, required a strong constitution, but also certain organic reserves from which to draw the necessary energy to battle poor weather, to endure deprivation and to brave obstacles and perils.
‘Organic reserves: what sort of a dreadful medical notion is that!’ thought Auguste. Did the country not have any consideration for its sons, viewing them as nothing more than a store of organs to be endlessly drawn upon? And yet those young men whom he had seen marching in the streets could not wait to go to war against the Prussians. To Berlin! To Berlin! they were all shouting, those innocent, gullible young men; white-hot cannon fodder that would be hurled at the other side for the sole purpose of serving economic interests about which those poor fellows knew nothing. Generation after generation of families could be decimated in these slaughters, with mothers sometimes losing every one of their boys, and yet it seemed the whole world just put up with it – worse, brayed for it again and again – one historical cataclysm hard on the heels of another.
In addition to an impressive list of deformities that allowed conscripts to be exempted when called before the recruitment board – goitre, tissue loss, chronic congestion, congenital idiocy, osteogenesis imperfecta, scrofula, rectal prolapse, supernumerary limbs – there was also a long list of illnesses such as syphilis, cancer, smallpox, tuberculosis or scurvy which offered those afflicted young men the opportunity to die in their bed rather than on the battlefield.
Another passage read: Abnormal ugliness resulting from defective anatomical composition which is likely to inspire repugnance and a degree of despair in the young soldier’s fellow comrades shall be considered incompatible with military life where the majority of actions are shared endeavours ... No luck there, women found him very handsome, and, having acquired every possible malady as a child, he now enjoyed a cast-iron constitution!