a burning fever, chattering teeth. He coughed sputum stained with blood, and a scraping, crackling noise came from his chest, quite audible to anyone in the room. ‘Lungs possibly not too good,’ the leech said. ‘All those ribs driven into them at frequent intervals. Sorry, my dear. Better fetch the priest.’
The priest came. He gave him the last rites. But the boy failed to die that night. Three days later he still clung to a comatose half-life. His sister Marie-Cécile organized a cycle of prayers; she took the hardest shift, two o’clock in the morning till dawn. The parlour filled up with relations, sitting around trying to say the right thing. There were yawning silences, broken by the desperate sound of everyone speaking at once. News of each breath was relayed from room to room.
On the fourth day he sat up, recognized his family. On the fifth day he cracked jokes, and demanded food in quantity.
He was pronounced out of danger.
They had planned to open the grave, and bury him beside his father. The coffin, which they had put in an outhouse, had to be sent back. Luckily, they had only put a deposit on it.
When Georges-Jacques was convalescent, his stepfather made an expedition to Troyes. Upon his return, he announced that he had found the boy a place in the minor seminary.
‘You dolt,’ his wife said. ‘Confess it, you just want him out of the house.’
‘How can I give my time to my inventions?’ Recordain asked reasonably. ‘I’m living on a battlefield. If it’s not stamping pigs it’s crackling lungs. Who else goes in the river in November? Who else goes in it at all? People in Arcis have no need to know how to swim. The boy’s above himself.’
‘Perhaps he could be a priest, after all,’ Madame said, conciliatory.
‘Oh yes,’ Uncle Camus said. ‘I can just see him ministering to his flock. Perhaps they’ll send him on a Crusade.’
‘I don’t know where he gets his brains from,’ Madame said. ‘There’s no brains in the family.’
‘Thanks,’ her brother said.
‘Of course, just because he goes to the seminary it doesn’t mean he has to be a priest. There’s the law. We’ve got law in the family.’
‘And if he disliked the verdict? The mind recoils.’
‘Anyway,’ Madame said, ‘let me keep him at home for a year or two, Jean. He’s my only son. He’s a comfort to me.’
‘Whatever makes you happy,’ Jean Recordain said. He was a mild, easy-going man who pleased his wife by doing exactly as she told him; much of his time nowadays he spent in an outlying farm building where he was inventing a machine for spinning cotton. He said it would change the world.
His stepson was fourteen years old when he removed his noisy and overgrown presence to the ancient cathedral city of Troyes. Troyes was an orderly town. The livestock had a sense of its lowly place in the universe, and the Fathers did not allow swimming. There seemed an outside chance that he would survive.
Later, when he looked back on his childhood, he always described it as extraordinarily happy.
IN A THINNER, greyer, more northerly light, a wedding is celebrated. It is 2 January, and the sparse, cold congregation are able to wish each other the compliments of the season.
Jacqueline Carraut’s love affair occupied the spring and summer of 1757, and by Michaelmas she knew she was pregnant. She never made mistakes. Or only big ones, she thought.
Because her lover had now cooled towards her, because her father was a choleric man, she let out the bodices of her dresses, and kept herself very quietly. When she sat at her father’s table and could not eat, she shovelled the food down to the terrier who sat by her skirts. Advent came.
‘If you had told me earlier,’ her lover said, ‘we would have only had the row about a brewer’s daughter marrying into the de Robespierre family. But now, the way you’re swelling up, we have a scandal as well.’
‘A love child,’ Jacqueline said. She was not romantic by nature, but she felt the posture forced upon her. She held up her chin as she stood at the altar, and looked the family in the eye all day. Her own family, that is; the de Robespierre family stayed at home.
François was twenty-six years old. He was the rising star of the local barrister’s association and one of the district’s most coveted bachelors. The de Robespierre family had been in the Arras district for three hundred years. They had no money, and they were very proud. Jacqueline was amazed by the household into which she was received. In her father’s house, where the brewer ranted all day and bawled his workers out, great joints of meat were put upon the table. The de Robespierres were polite to each other, and ate thin soup.
Thinking of her, as they did, as a robust, common sort of girl, they ladled huge watery platefuls in her direction. They even offered her father’s beer. But Jacqueline was not robust. She was sick and frail. A good thing she had married into gentility, people said spitefully. There was no work to be got out of her. She was just a little china ornament, a piece of porcelain, her narrow shape distorted by the coming child.
François had stood before the priest and done his duty; but once he met her body between the sheets, he felt again the original, visceral passion. He was drawn to the new heart that beat in her side, to the primitive curve of her ribs. He was awed by her translucent skin, by the skin inside her wrists which showed greenish marble veins. He was drawn by her myopic green eyes, wide-open eyes that could soften or sharpen like the eyes of a cat. When she spoke, her phrases were like little claws, sinking in.
‘They have that salty soup in their veins,’ she said. ‘If you cut them, they would bleed good manners. Tomorrow, thank God, we shall be in our own house.’
It was an embarrassed, embattled winter. François’s two sisters hovered about, taking messages and being afraid of saying too much. Jacqueline’s child, a boy, was born on 6 May, at two in the morning. Later that day, the family met at the font. François’s father stood godparent, so the baby was named after him, Maximilien. It was a good, old, family name, he told Jacqueline’s mother; it was a good, old family to which her daughter now belonged.
There were three more children of this marriage within the next five years. The time came to Jacqueline when sickness, then fear, then pain, was her natural condition. She did not remember any other kind of life.
THAT DAY AUNT EULALIE read them a story. It was called ‘The Fox and the Cat’. She read very quickly, snapping the pages over. It is called not giving your full attention, he thought. If you were a child they would smack you for it. And this book was his favourite.
She was quite like the fox herself, jutting her chin up to listen, her sandy eyebrows drawing together. Disregarded, he slid down on to the floor, and played with the bit of lace at her cuff. His mother could make lace.
He was full of foreboding; never was he allowed to sit on the floor (wearing out your good clothes).
His aunt broke off in the middle of sentences, to listen. Upstairs, Jacqueline was dying. Her children did not know this yet.
They had evicted the midwife, for she had done no good. She was in the kitchen now eating cheese, scraping the rind with relish, frightening the servant-girl with precedents. They had sent for the surgeon; at the top of the stairs, François argued with him. Aunt Eulalie sprang up and closed the door, but you could still hear them. She read on with a peculiar note in her voice, stretching out her thin, white, lady’s hand to Augustin’s cradle, rocking, rocking.
‘I see no way to deliver her,’ the man said, ‘except by cutting.’ He did not like the word, you could see; but he had to use it. ‘I might save the child.’
‘Save her,’ François said.
‘If I do nothing, they’ll both die.’
‘You can kill it, but save her.’
Eulalie clenched her fist on the cradle,