Eventually my body gave up fighting and began to sink and, beyond my control, my throat drew water. Water and river silt entered my trachea, my lungs. Something popped deep inside my ear. I vomited and, with a violent rush, more water, silt and leaves filled the evacuated space inside me. At last, a tingling started in my fingertips. It was remote, pleasant. I opened my eyes (though they may have been open all along) and there was something pale and dead floating very close to my face. My hand. And then darkness surrounded me, like steam from a hot bath clouding a mirror, and a feeling grew too; it was as if I’d been handed the universe in a glass jar. All I had to do was open it. Just as my heart was pumping its last beats, I was hooked at the waistband by a pole and lifted on to the hard deck of a grain barge. And this is where I died.

1

L’Inconnue

Before Paris

I had been living in Paris for a year and a half before my death, having gained employment as a lady’s companion to an old friend of my grandmother’s, a Madame Cornélie Debord. Before receiving Madame Debord’s letter requesting I come to live with her in Paris, life for me, in my home of Clermont-Ferrand, had become empty, and I was adrift.

My birth had been the death of my mother. In 1880, in Clermont-Ferrand, this was not a shock – it sometimes happened. Nonetheless, death due to childbirth was horrific. It was bloody, sweaty and exhausting, and happened either during labour or days later from blood loss or infection. My mother’s death was attended by three women: her older sister Huguette, the midwife, and my grandmother on my father’s side. Tante Huguette always held me responsible for her baby sister’s death but my grandmother did not, and this conflict was waged between them from the moment I took my first breath, and lasted for eleven years, ending only when my dear grandmother expelled her last.

I grew up knowing things about my birth that I probably should not have. For example, Tante Huguette told me that after two days of labour without progression, my mother’s green eyes turned as black and flat as the eyes of a pigeon. She sweated and shat and vomited and bled until her body was dry. In the end, the midwife ripped me from my mother’s body by my feet and I entered the world ass-first, tearing my mother from flower to anus.

Tante Huguette told me that when her pain was at its greatest, my mother begged them to kill us both. I believed this for most of my life.

My father, who was an apprentice baker in the Compagnons and away in Nantes when I was born, came home for one week to meet me and mourn the death of my mother. The Compagnons, a guild of masters, a society of artisans – bakers, carpenters, shoemakers, plasterers, locksmiths – with secret ceremonies and rites of passage, had strict rules and he wasn’t able to stay longer. He had just begun his Tour de France, a five-year apprenticeship that would take him all over the country, and he didn’t see me again until I was almost two years old. Because he couldn’t afford to pay a wet nurse, I was fed for my first few months on goat’s milk or pap sucked through a knob of cork, looked after by a loving grandmother and begrudging aunt.