The armistice is signed on 26 January 1871. More than six months pregnant and no longer able to conceal her pregnancy, she’s watching for boats arriving back to the island, and when sailors come ashore she peppers them feverishly with questions about roads and railways reopening, as well as asking whether any soldiers are returning. January, February, still nothing. At the start of March, suffering from the spitefulness and suffocating stupidity that reigns in such small, insular places, shunned by her own family, who accuse her of having brought shame upon them, she does what everybody with any problem used to do at the time: she goes to see the priest.

‘Leave the island, immediately! Take the money from the notary’s office and find whoever it was who bought Breval. If he died in the war, he owes you the balance. There are 4000 francs waiting for you at Brest, so go and make something of your life. Just be sure never to return!’ That’s what she must have been advised by the colossus from the Île Bourbon, because she never set foot on our island again until 1920, at the age of seventy.

Let me just clarify that I did not make him up, that priest. I have described him as he appears in the etchings published in L’Illustration at the time of the shipwrecked Drummond Castle in 1896 which resulted in 358 deaths.

I also picked up a trace of Corentine’s passage to Brest in the minutes of the notarial office of Kersauzon de Pennendreff in the Finistère departmental archives. On 3 March 1871 she received the 4000-franc payment retained by the notary, as witnessed by Breval prior to his departure for the army, and on 6 March the Brest–Paris line reopened all the way through to the Gare Montparnasse.

So there’s Corentine Malgorn in a train packed to the rafters, crossing a France that’s under full Prussian occupation. She’s twenty-one years old. She’s wearing a black, calf-length dress that hides her belly, a black, embroidered shawl that shows off her Communion cross and a white bonnet over her short hair. She speaks sufficient French to get by, because until the age of thirteen she attended the convent school, where the nuns taught the language to educate the boys before they joined the Navy. Most importantly, she knows how to read. It’s not just that which renders her eminently modern: she is a product of the only matriarchal society in Europe; her life will not, then, tell the story of the men who have trampled over her. She knows only the family name of the people who bought her fiancé. The de Rignys, from Saint-Germain-en-Laye. She is so pregnant she’s about to burst, and she has no time to lose.