This much-anticipated date had been haunting him since the month of October, when he had presented himself at the town hall for the census of the class of 1869, the year of his twentieth birthday. Trying not to dwell on the matter during the festive season, he had remained in a permanent state of inebriation until January, then had surprised himself by coming to see the draw as offering a conclusion to his agonising.

The countdown was finally over and today was the day!

This morning he would finally know if he drew a bad number, forcing him to abandon the Sorbonne – to give up his Parisian life, his pleasures, his indolent habits – for nine years of degrading military service, five of which would find him surrounded by brutish louts in damp barracks furnished with poor bedding.

The ring of that devilish invention made him jump, causing his innards to contract: those not appearing for roll call at eight o’clock sharp shall be the first to be given their marching orders were the words written at the foot of his call-up notice.

How he would have loved his mother and sister to accompany him to the draw. Unfortunately they had both been called as a matter of urgency to the bedside of an aunt who had taken ill. Nor was his father able to join him, confined to the house as he was with a poor back. That left his brother-in-law, Jules, a former officer turned businessman, and his brother, Ferdinand, an ambitious type who practised a cult-like devotion to money and whose favourite pastime was to back Auguste into a corner until he was ready to explode. Even if those two had offered to provide him with some comfort in the face of his ordeal, Auguste would have categorically refused.

The women of the family had not, however, abandoned him entirely, since they had arranged to have a mass said at Saint-Germain-de-Paris asking Providence to spare him the fate of military service. Obviously, Auguste did not believe in God: even less so since reading On the Origin of Species, a luminous beacon of a book that succeeded in scientifically refuting the grotesque notion of life as divine creation, but privately he told himself that neither could the prayers bought by his mother do him any harm.