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 him. ‘When can I go home?’ he said.
Eulalie said, ‘You’ll be all right with Grandmother for a few days, till your mother’s feeling better.’
But he remembered the grey flesh around her mouth. He understood what her mouth had said to him: soon I shall be in my coffin and soon I shall be buried.
He wondered why they told lies in this way.
He counted the days. Aunt Eulalie and Aunt Henriette went to and fro. They said, aren’t you going to ask us how your mother is today? Aunt Henriette said to Grandmother, ‘Maximilien doesn’t ask how his mother is.’
Grandmother replied, ‘He’s a chilly little article.’
He counted the days until they decided to tell the truth. Nine days passed. It was breakfast time. When they were having their bread and milk, Grandmother came in.
‘You must be very brave,’ she said. ‘Your mother has gone to live with Jesus.’
Baby Jesus, he thought. He said, ‘I know.’
When this happened, he was six. A white curtain fluttered in the breeze from the open window, sparrows fussed on the sill; God the Father, trailing clouds of glory, looked down from a picture on the wall.
THEN IN A DAY OR TWO, sister Charlotte pointing to the coffin; his smaller sister Henriette grumbling in a corner, fractious and disregarded.
‘I will read to you,’ he told Charlotte. ‘But not that animal book. It is too childish for me.’
Later the grown-up Henriette, who was his aunt, lifted him up to look in the coffin before it was closed. She was shaking, and said over his head, ‘I didn’t want to show him, it was Grandfather Carraut who said it must be done.’ He understood very well that it was his mother, the hatchet-nosed corpse with its terrifying paper hands.
Aunt Eulalie ran out into the street. She said, ‘François, I beg of you.’ Maximilien ran after her, grabbing at her skirts; he saw how his father did not once turn back. François strode down the street, off into the town. Aunt Eulalie towed the child with her, back into the house. ‘He has to sign the death certificate,’ she said. ‘He says he won’t put his name to it. What are we going to do?’
Next day, François came back. He smelled of brandy and Grandfather Carraut said it was obvious he had been with a woman.
During the next few months François began to drink heavily. He neglected his clients, and they went elsewhere. He would disappear for days at a time; one day he packed a bag, and said he was going for good.
They said – Grandmother and Grandfather Carraut – that they had never liked him. They said, we have no quarrel with the de Robespierres, they are decent people, but him, he is not a decent person. At first they kept up the fiction that he was engaged in a lengthy and prestigious case in another city. He did return from time to time, drifting in, usually to borrow money. The elder de Robespierres – ‘at our time of life’ – did not feel they could give his children a home. Grandfather Carraut took the two boys, Maximilien and Augustin. Aunt Eulalie and Aunt Henriette, who were unmarried, said they would take the little girls.
At some point during his childhood, Maximilien found out, or was told, that he had been conceived out of wedlock. Possibly he put the worst construction on his family circumstances, because during the rest of his life he never mentioned his parents at all.
IN 1768 FRANÇOIS de Robespierre turned up in Arras after an absence of two years. He said he had been abroad, but he did not say where, or how he had lived. He went over to Grandfather Carraut’s house, and asked to see his son. Maximilien stood in a passageway and heard them shouting from behind a closed door.
‘You say you have never got over it,’ Grandfather Carraut said. ‘But have you stopped to ask your son whether he has got over it? The child is her image, he’s not strong; she was not strong; you knew that when you forced yourself on her after each childbirth. It’s only thanks to me that they have any clothes to their backs and are growing up Christians.’
His father came out and found him and said, he’s thin, he’s small for his age. He spent a few minutes talking to him in a strained and embarrassed way. Leaving, he bent down to kiss him on the forehead. His breath was sour. The love child jerked his head back, with an adult expression of distaste. François seemed disappointed. Perhaps he wanted a hug, a kiss, to swing his son around in the air?
Afterwards the child, who had learned to measure out sparingly
