‘A love child,’ Jacqueline said. She was not romantic by nature, but she felt the posture forced upon her. She held up her chin as she stood at the altar, and looked the family in the eye all day. Her own family, that is; the de Robespierre family stayed at home.
François was twenty-six years old. He was the rising star of the local barrister’s association and one of the district’s most coveted bachelors. The de Robespierre family had been in the Arras district for three hundred years. They had no money, and they were very proud. Jacqueline was amazed by the household into which she was received. In her father’s house, where the brewer ranted all day and bawled his workers out, great joints of meat were put upon the table. The de Robespierres were polite to each other, and ate thin soup.
Thinking of her, as they did, as a robust, common sort of girl, they ladled huge watery platefuls in her direction. They even offered her father’s beer. But Jacqueline was not robust. She was sick and frail. A good thing she had married into gentility, people said spitefully. There was no work to be got out of her. She was just a little china ornament, a piece of porcelain, her narrow shape distorted by the coming child.
François had stood before the priest and done his duty; but once he met her body between the sheets, he felt again the original, visceral passion. He was drawn to the new heart that beat in her side, to the primitive curve of her ribs. He was awed by her translucent skin, by the skin inside her wrists which showed greenish marble veins. He was drawn by her myopic green eyes, wide-open eyes that could soften or sharpen like the eyes of a cat. When she spoke, her phrases were like little claws, sinking in.
‘They have that salty soup in their veins,’ she said. ‘If you cut them, they would bleed good manners. Tomorrow, thank God, we shall be in our own house.’
It was an embarrassed, embattled winter. François’s two sisters hovered about, taking messages and being afraid of saying too much. Jacqueline’s child, a boy, was born on 6 May, at two in the morning. Later that day, the family met at the font. François’s father stood godparent, so the baby was named after him, Maximilien. It was a good, old, family name, he told Jacqueline’s mother; it was a good, old family to which her daughter now belonged.
There were three more children of this marriage within the next five years. The time came to Jacqueline when sickness, then fear, then pain, was her natural condition. She did not remember any other kind of life.
THAT DAY AUNT EULALIE read them a story. It was called ‘The Fox and the Cat’. She read very quickly, snapping the pages over. It is called not giving your full attention, he thought. If you were a child they would smack you for it. And this book was his favourite.
She was quite like the fox herself, jutting her chin up to listen, her sandy eyebrows drawing together. Disregarded, he slid down on to the floor, and played with the bit of lace at her cuff. His mother could make lace.
He was full of foreboding; never was he allowed to sit on the floor (wearing out your good clothes).
His aunt broke off in the middle of sentences, to listen. Upstairs, Jacqueline was dying. Her children did not know this yet.
They had evicted the midwife, for she had done no good. She was in the kitchen now eating cheese, scraping the rind with relish, frightening the servant-girl with precedents. They had sent for the surgeon; at the top of the stairs, François argued with him. Aunt Eulalie sprang up and closed the door, but you could still hear them. She read on with a peculiar note in her voice, stretching out her thin, white, lady’s hand to Augustin’s cradle, rocking, rocking.
‘I see no way to deliver her,’ the man said, ‘except by cutting.’ He did not like the word, you could see; but he had to use it. ‘I might save the child.’
‘Save her,’ François said.
‘If I do nothing, they’ll both die.’
‘You can kill it, but save her.’
Eulalie clenched her fist on the cradle, and Augustin cried at the jolt. Lucky Augustin, already born.
They were arguing now – the surgeon impatient at the layman’s slow comprehension. ‘Then I might as well fetch the butcher,’ François shouted.
Aunt Eulalie stood up, and the book slipped out of her fingers, slithered down her skirt, fell and opened itself on the floor. She ran up the stairs: ‘For Jesus’ sake. Your voices. The children.’
The pages fanned over – the fox and the cat, the tortoise and the hare, wise crow with his glinting eye, the honey bear under the tree. Maximilien picked it up and straightened the bent corners of the pages. He put his sister’s fat hands on the cradle. ‘Like this,’ he said, rocking.
She raised her face, with its slack infant mouth. ‘Why?’
Aunt Eulalie passed him without seeing him, perspiration broken out along her upper lip. His feet pattered on the stairs. His father was folded into a chair, crying, his arm thrown over his eyes. The surgeon was looking in his bag. ‘My forceps,’ he said. ‘I shall make the attempt, at least. The technique is sometimes efficacious.’
The child pushed the door just a little, making a gap to slip in. The windows were closed against the early summer, against the buzzing fragrance from gardens and fields. There was a good fire, and logs lay ready in a basket. The heat was close and visible. His mother’s body was shrouded in white, her back propped against cushions, her hair scraped from her forehead into a band. She turned to him just her eyes, not her head, and the threadbare remnants of a smile. The skin around her mouth was grey.
Soon, it seemed to say, you and I shall part.
When he had seen this he turned away. At the door he raised a hand to her, a feeble adult gesture of solidarity. Outside the door the surgeon had taken off his topcoat and stood with it over his arm, waiting for someone to take it away from him and hang it up. ‘If you had called me a few hours ago …’ the surgeon remarked, to no one in particular. François’s chair was empty. It seemed he had left the house.
The priest arrived. ‘If the head would emerge,’ he said, ‘I should baptise it.’
‘If the head would emerge our troubles would be over,’ the surgeon said.
‘Or any limb,’ the priest said hopefully. ‘The church countenances it.’
Eulalie passed back into the room. The heat billowed out as she opened the door. ‘Can it be good for her? There is no air.’
‘Chills are disastrous,’ the surgeon said. ‘Though anyway –’
‘Extreme Unction, then,’ the priest suggested. ‘I hope there is a convenient table.’
He took out of his bag a white altar cloth, and delved in again for his candles. The grace of God, portable, brought to your hearth and home.
The surgeon’s eyes roamed around the stairhead. ‘Get that child away,’ he said.
Eulalie gathered him into her arms: the love child. As she carried him downstairs the fabric of her dress chafed his cheek, made a tiny sound of rasping.
Eulalie lined them up by the front door. ‘Your gloves,’ she said. ‘Your hats.’
‘It’s warm,’ he said. ‘We don’t really need our gloves.’
‘Nevertheless,’ she insisted. Her face seemed to quiver.
The wet-nurse pushed past them, the baby Augustin tossed against her shoulder, held with one hand as if he were a sack. ‘Five in six years,’ she said to Eulalie, ‘what can you expect? Her luck’s run out, that’s all.’
They went to Grandfather Carraut’s. Later that day Aunt Eulalie came, and said that they must pray for their baby brother. Grandmother Carraut mouthed, ‘Christened?’ Aunt Eulalie shook her head. She cast an eye down at the children, a can’t-say-too-much look. She mouthed back at Grandmother: ‘Born dead.’
He shuddered. Aunt Eulalie bent down to kiss