‘Look, there, down the bottom, it’s in there every day.’

‘Serviceman entitled to furlough is offering to replace young soldier currently enrolled as a student: present yourself at 12 Rue Piat.’

‘Several young men wishing to enlist in the army as substitutes: present yourself at 12 Rue Piat.’

‘Where’s Rue Piat?’

‘At the top of Rue de Belleville, between the Buttes-Chaumont Park and the customs posts.’

Auguste consulted his watch.

‘If I take a carriage now, I’ll make it before nightfall.’

The young man left without further ado and hailed a fiacre to take him to the address indicated.

The cab headed down Boulevard Poissonnière, then turned at Rue du Faubourg du Temple to head up to Belleville, as Rue Piat lay well beyond the invisible border drawn by Boulevards Strasbourg, Sébastopol and Saint Michel, which divided Paris in two, the wealthy on one side, the poor on the other.

Although he had never ventured so deep into these neighbourhoods, he was aware what living conditions there were like since Haussmann’s opening up of the city and the dizzying increase in rents. Thousands of people were crammed into rickety, overpopulated buildings or makeshift dwellings amounting to little more than a pile of clapboards, and all this in deplorably unhygienic circumstances. He knew the labourers who went to work in the city centre every morning came from these neighbourhoods. That they were exploited, lucky to be paid even three francs a day, and their wives half that, when in order to feed and lodge a family, a minimum of four francs was required for a room in a slumlord’s lodgings, even in Belleville.

He would have to have been blind not to notice the hordes of scruffy children left entirely to their own devices, the young girls being prostituted, the single mothers who’d been impregnated by their master then dismissed from their position, their sickly offspring clinging to their skirts, all of them doing their best to linger on the edge of that area where they might rub up against the wealthy and make off with a few coins.

He would have to have been a fool not to realise that something in society was not functioning as it should.

To display sensitivity to the distress of the poor in the face of one’s own good fortune was a matter fraught with complications, and one his own family was evidently incapable of comprehending, but Auguste found himself seduced by the challenge. He could not deny his own social status and the gap that might exist between himself and the proletariat whose cause he was espousing; nonetheless, he was keen to find a way to at least bridge that gap, through some form of exchange or contact, even if he were unable to fill it entirely.