Heading out, the young man came across a few neighbours seeking refuge under their umbrellas, all of them gathered around a worker in a smock coat perched high on a ladder, who was busy removing the Rue du 10 Décembre street sign. Among them, he recognised Monsieur Blin, the pig-breeder from the apartment on the fourth floor. Monsieur Blin was calling out to the worker.

‘Eh, so what are they going to call our street now, then, my good man?’

‘Rue du 4 Septembre, it seems,’ answered a lady with a bird’s nest chignon.

‘Vive la République!’ trumpeted Blin, cheerfully.

‘It took him scarcely a week, that turncoat,’ thought Auguste. To have listened to that amateur pork butcher prior to the defeat at Sedan and the surrender that followed, one would have thought it necessary to defend the Empire in hand-to-hand combat. On the 4th of September, the day the Republic was proclaimed – a fine celebration, as it happens, in radiant sunshine, with the whole of Paris in the streets and not a drop of blood spilt – he shut himself away in his apartment. And now here he was outside, a red carnation in his buttonhole, exclaiming in delight.

The worker, who was soaked and utterly indifferent to the commotion going on under the umbrellas, unveiled the new sign.

‘Vive la République!’ came the onlookers’ chorus.

Impassively, he finished screwing on the rectangle of enamelled metal.

‘Hey, you up there! Why aren’t you saying anything?’ asked Blin, his face upturned. ‘Aren’t you celebrating? Would you prefer the Emperor?’

‘It’s six of one and half-a-dozen of the other, and rotten they all are!’ said the worker, calmly climbing down. ‘I’m just putting up a new sign on an old shop, is all. That’s not the future we’re waiting for. Not at all.’

His last comment worked like a bucket of iced water tossed into the faces of those gathered.

‘Riff-raff!’ said Monsieur Blin.

‘I know what you’re all thinking, the lot of you . . . That one day we’re going to come for you with our women and kids, and we’re going to eye your pretty apartment and say to ourselves: Why, wouldn’t we feel right at home in there! Well, if you ask me, you should all feel guilty, good an’ proper, even thinking such a thing.’

All of a sudden, the rain stopped and the sun came out.

The man went calmly on his way, taking his ladder with him, followed by the disconcerted looks of the crowd.

While some in Paris would head to the city’s fortifications every day with their spyglasses, scanning the horizon for the Prussians’ arrival, others, like Auguste, would rush to the news kiosks just as the latest editions of the newspapers hit the stands, trying to predict the future as they dissected the press.