At its base, I put Casimir, the father of Auguste, who was the one who had acknowledged my grandfather, the war cripple. Casimir had produced three children, Berthe, Ferdinand – and the infamous Auguste. Berthe had not had any children, but Ferdinand had had four: one girl and three boys. It seems the women in the de Rigny family suffered genetic issues relating to childbirth, because Berthe was not the only one without any offspring; her niece Agnès, Ferdinand’s daughter, had registered the stillbirths of five children in the parish of Saint-Germain-de-Paris. Of Ferdinand’s three sons, two had died young during the Great War, one in 1916 and the other in 1917, without offspring. Only the last baby, Guillaume de Rigny, born in 1905, had survived. He had married a younger woman, Yvonne, who had given birth in about 1945 to our friend Philippe, otherwise known as the Super Prick, and then to twins Pierre and Marianne. Philippe had two children, Marianne one and Pierre none. I didn’t discover anything else regarding my putative great-grandfather Auguste. Nothing more about the son he had formally recognised on the official certificate I had in my possession, which seemed understandable given that the Communards had torched all the Parisian records of births, deaths and marriages that had been held at the Town Hall since the sixteenth century, as well as the duplicate records archived at Avenue Victoria; a political gesture intended to create a tabula rasa of bourgeois lines of descent and heredity. Nor was there any further mention of the date or place of his death which might have enlightened me as to his fate.

To Auguste’s branch, then, I added the little limb which History had forgotten: us, the nobodies from Brittany, adding a pretty little flower at the end for my daughter, Juliette.

With the branch of Alice de Rigny – the innocent tourist – having been snapped off by the hand of nature’s fury, I was struck by the scarcity of vegetation on that side. It consisted of only six people: Yvonne de Rigny née Guyot, born 1921, who, as you might say, had one foot in the grave and the other slipping in, her son Philippe and her daughter Marianne, both divorced, as well as their children, who were about my age, all born in the ’80s. None of them had married nor had any children. Then there was Pierre, Marianne’s twin, who also hadn’t married or had any children.

It was the sort of tortured, sickly tree you find growing in barren soil.