‘Well, it’s not the people you’d expect who contribute. For example, the other day we went collecting in the 7th arrondissement. A very wealthy lady had just turned us away when her servant stopped me in the stairwell to ask if the poor were also able to donate. He went to fetch two francs for me. Women who are queuing at the stoves where soup is being handed out, who sometimes have to wait five hours in the cold, they run after us just to hand us a few cents.’

‘And that surprises you?’

‘I do not understand how one could not be patriotic at such a time, when the fortifications are holding in the east and we are still fighting.’

The hall of the Folies-Belleville where the Favié Club was meeting was plunged in semi-darkness and there was no heating. The blueish smoke from pipes added to the fug, shrouding the stage. There was a mixed and colourful crowd: many in National and Mobile Guard uniforms but also numerous working-class women with their infants asleep in their arms, as well as a few well-dressed bourgeois ladies; all were there to take advantage of the warmth generated by a collection of human bodies and to enjoy the distraction of the speakers.

When Auguste and his aunt entered the room, the topic of discussion was food supplies. The speaker on stage was talking about killing all domesticated animals, especially those horses used to draw mortuary carriages whose owners fed them bread, as well as companion animals.

‘Let the rich carry their own dead,’ cried one woman.

‘Hear, hear!’ agreed one section of the audience.

‘I do not wish my dog to be eaten. I share my ration with him and that is entirely a matter for me,’ added one well-to-do lady with a pug on her lap.

Laughter.

‘Well, then, we shall hold off sacrificing that one, but keep a firm grip on him, that white sausage of yours, for we’re all eyeing him off.’

Laughter.

‘Next point: theft of wood from construction sites and the felling of ornamental trees.’

‘We’re cold!’ came a shout from the hall.

‘What people are doing now with all the wood? . . . We should have done it a long time ago with the shop windows of grocers and butchers in the rich neighbourhoods. Let’s at least strip the furniture from the mansions whose owners have left,’ suggested one man. ‘That will give us something to burn.’

Auguste leapt onto the stage and took over from the previous speaker, never taking his eyes off his audience.