As for the Breval Botquelen episode, she had absolutely nothing further to recount except to say: ‘Well, he was a man, what else is there to say . . .’ ‘He was indeed brave . . .’ Or ‘it is truly sad what happened to him . . .’ No romantic impulses, no lover’s sorrow, nothing. As if the woman had not expected anything of the poor lad but that he be the progenitor of her child. As to general conversation, it was hardly any better. When he had sought her political opinions, she had replied, ‘All I really want is to be able to eat my soup in peace, set up a fine business and above all else cause no trouble to the Good Lord,’ in that ghastly accent reeking of muddy earth.

Pious, unintelligent, and a likely adherent to the royalist Chouan peasant movements, Corentine was, in her own way, somewhat puzzling; at once very free-spirited, and yet quite the antithesis of the type of emancipated woman with whom he was rubbing shoulders at the barricades on a daily basis.

. . . Credo in Spiritum Sanctum, sanctam Ecclesiam catholicam, sanctorum communionem, remissionem peccatorum, carnis resurrectionem vitam aeternam.

Amen.

‘There we go, it’s done, let us be off!’ said Auguste, steering the two Breton women towards the door.

They complied ungraciously, and not without casting him a dark look for having ushered them out of the church.

At the door to the town hall, they were greeted by Perrachon and Trousselier, dressed in their National Guard uniforms, and by an old unkempt revolutionary poet from 1848, Eugène Pottier, the new mayor of the 2nd arrondissement. The latter offered Corentine a bouquet of red carnations as he bestowed upon her a Greetings, citizen, which caused her no end of displeasure.

They then went into the reception room of the town hall. Auguste had, for the occasion, prepared a speech rich in obscure rhetoric involving the Mother Country, anti-capitalism and the tyranny of commodities, but he could not find his notes. The ceremony thus boiled down to a recitation of Pottier’s poem ‘L’Enfant’, performed by the author himself, which finished with:

Mother, mother, the time is nigh

Come drape with your red flag

The cradle of your new child

Then it was time to note the parentage on the register of births, deaths and marriages.

‘So, what is this little citizen to be called?’ the mayor enquired of its parents.

‘Renan,’ said Corentine. ‘I want to call him Renan.’

‘Your father’s name, no doubt . . .’

‘No, it is nobody’s name. It’s the name I have chosen for him!’

Auguste intervened: ‘When the ceremony is over, my comrades and I will be joining forces with Duval and Flourens to defend Paris. In recognition of this action, I wish him to have Astyanax as his second name.’

‘Excellent,’ said the poet.

‘What sort of a name is that?’ asked the widow, frowning.