And then. You came. With a warm gush of swampy water and hot blood, you came. I felt you, your head, the hard, solid skull of you pushing eagerly towards this brand-new life. I felt your slick and sticky warmth when you were placed on my chest, you with movements that were slow, like cloth billowing underwater, as if you hadn’t yet realized this great transition. As if you thought you were still in the womb. The doctor tied two ligatures around the cord that united us, and with blunt-ended scissors it was cut. And you were cast adrift. He ignored Audette’s cries that the cord must be severed at a certain distance from your small body – something having to do with the potential of your singing voice, she claimed – and he tied off the end with a clean strip of cloth. Madame covered your head with a sweet little cap and then you were taken from me. The white paste that greased your skin was removed with linens doused in water that had been warmed to the same temperature in which you had lived for those nine months before. Madame even cleaned your little ears, and all your orifices, with linen twisted into small tents, and, in spite of this intrusion, you made no complaint. Cocooned tightly in white, you were finally returned to me with your red, pinched face, asleep. Audette fed me a brew of some horrid mixture to prevent haemorrhage and, after the doctor left (because he wouldn’t have approved), we gave you a spoonful of warm red wine doused with treacle to cut through the birth-phlegm in your throat; to comfort your stomach and cleanse it of any filth you might have ingested during your journey; to strengthen your brain against madness. On these points, Madame Debord was emphatic.

I, it must be said, was lovingly washed from head to foot by Madame Debord and Audette. They placed a warm cloth between my legs to absorb the flow of blood, and bandaged my abdomen tightly with a towel.

You. Had a shock of black hair that grew in a cowlick from the left side of your head to the right. Your toes were extraordinarily long and your legs bent up either side of your belly like a frog. Your gums were rigid against my breast when you fed, which was all you did for the first week of your life. You were attached to me, and I was attached to the bed with the blood of the lochia and with fatigue.

You weren’t the only newborn in the apartment. Madame. She was enraptured, empowered. She went outside alone, to do the shopping, for the first time in fifteen years. She fed me stewed partridge as it was easy to digest, but denied me fruit against the risk of flatulence. I was given plenty of white wine and brandy.

‘Food that will stick to the ribs,’ Madame said, watching me eat a bowl of thick bread soup with vegetables and chicken fat. ‘Fill the hole that’s been left inside you.’