Like so many other penniless women from Brittany, my great-grandmother, Corentine, would have taken advantage of the railways opening up the region and headed to the capital to seek work as a maid. She would have been taken into service by a wealthy bourgeois family, where she would have been impregnated by one of the male line, most likely the boy closest in age, Auguste. He would have taken her to his single aunt so she could give birth in the coolest neighbourhood of Haussmann’s Paris, the Grands Boulevards, or in other words to his aunt from the beautiful people set. He would have formally recognised the child with his uni mates as witnesses and would certainly have given him the Breton first name Renan, but also the revolutionary, impossible-to-pronounce name of Astyanax, meaning protector of the city in Ancient Greek. Having delivered her child into the world, she appears to have opened a restaurant that same year . . . And all this in the middle of the Prussian occupation and against the backdrop of the crushing of the Paris Commune.

That is what I took from that old birth certificate.

Let me rephrase it for you . . .

You’ll admit, the story I’d been served up didn’t hold water for a second. And no need for a doctor of letters to work that out; you just needed to have read Zola’s Pot-Bouille:

So, it wasn’t enough never to be able to eat her fill, to be the filthy, clumsy slattern, the subject of constant abuse by the entire household: the masters of the house then had to goand fix her up with a child! Ah! The bastards! Except that she could not have said whether it was the younger or the elder of them, because the old man had forced himself on her again the night of Shrove Tuesday. In any event, neither of them could have cared less, now they had taken their pleasure and she was left with the pain!

The author then recounts the young maid giving birth with the same clinical attention to detail he might have used to describe an animal dropping its offspring.

She gives birth in her room under the eaves, alone and silently, for fear of being turned out of the house, and abandons her infant on the ground in the covered arcade of the Passage Choiseul, pleased to have had some good fortune for once in that nobody saw her do it . . . And there you have the condition of maidservants in the nineteenth century. But never, ever would you flout the law of reproduction within one’s social class. And yet Auguste de Rigny had committed this ultimate transgression on 1 April 1871 by recognising my grandfather and, moreover, by choosing that first name – because I really can’t see a girl from my island in Brittany calling her son Astyanax.