‘I used to hunt for lucky stones on the shore,’ she said, one Sunday in August. We were sitting on a bench close to the Pont Royal, the river air boggy and humid. Working boats passed on the water, powered by oar or steam or sail, carrying coal, linen, flour, timber. Birds made a racket of cheeps and squawks and there was the clop and ricket of carriages above us on the quay. ‘A lucky stone is white and smooth; without any blemishes. It has a hole through its centre.’

‘Did you find any?’ I asked.

‘One.’

‘And did it bring good luck?’

‘The perfect stone is meant to bring a husband. Children.’

It had rained all the night before, and this morning the sun was strong. Water dripped from the acacias and steamed from the veins between the cobbles. My scalp prickled under the weight of my hat.

Madame Debord pulled at the ruffles of her collar and stared out at the water for a long time, then began to speak again. She told me she had been pregnant seven times. Out of those seven, four babies died in the womb. Out of the three who were born, two died within hours. One, the only one whom she named, lived for twelve days. All of this before Madame Debord reached the age of twenty-six. During this time, Madame Debord told me, she tried everything to keep her babies alive. She travelled to Plombières-les-Bains to bathe in a pool fed from an underground spring. The water, naturally heated and iron-rich and rust-coloured, like diluted blood, was said to be a cure for barrenness or other faults in the reproductive system. She changed the whole of her lifestyle, stayed away from loud noises or ruckuses of any kind. She stayed away from crowds.

‘Any excitement is bad for an unborn child,’ she said. ‘A woman is more prone to falling when she’s pregnant. She’s more sensitive to pandemonium and ill feelings of any kind. A baby in the womb is like uncooked bread, and any negative thoughts will affect him the same way the baker’s hand can misshape his dough.’

One doctor told her the babies were dying because her womb was too hot, so she ate only blandly cooked food – chicken boiled down to broth, or stews of lettuce and sorrel and spinach. She bathed in ice water. But later, another doctor declared the womb was too cold so she switched to salted venison and hot, steamy baths.

She was fortunate to have survived any of this, fortunate that her husband could afford doctors at all. She told me about Ambrose, the baby who lived for twelve days.

‘Mon chou,’ she said, my sweetie.

All this talk reminded me of what I knew about the bloody howling of my own birth, and I stopped listening to Madame. On the river, a weave of rubbish – blackened vegetables and dirty foam, sticks and weeds – passed by, undulating over small waves. When I turned my attention back to Madame Debord, she had her hands at her chest, palpating the area above her breasts in the way a kitten might press its mother’s abdomen to encourage the flow of milk.