Excerpt from Renoir's Dancer by Catherine Hewitt, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Madeleine turned 30 in 1860. Though a mother and a widow, she had retained the fresh-faced complexion so often associated with countryside youth, while her work had kept her body lean and supple. She was not unattractive, and as one of the younger women working at the inn, it was often on Madeleine that the roving male gaze first alighted.

'Don't go drawing attention to yourself,' Jeanne Dérozier warned when she noticed the interest her colleague was attracting. But Madeleine had no time for interference. And, just as she was inclined to become stubborn and quick-tempered when she felt cornered, it was not her way to meekly comply when others interfered in her business. Why should anyone begrudge her pleasure? After all she had suffered, did she not deserve the flattery of male attention if the opportunity presented itself? Madeleine was defiant. She would do as she pleased.

* * *

The winter of 1864/65 was especially cold. Snow first fell in early December. For much of January 1865, the sky was dreary, the snow flurries persistent and the cold unrelenting. And by February, Madeleine was pregnant.

'If only you had not drawn attention to yourself,' Jeanne lamented.

The riverside was soon abuzz with Madeleine's news. A widow's pregnancy six years after the death of her husband was a titillating scandal. But by far the most intriguing question remained: who was the father?

Stories began to circulate. It was some local Don Juan; no, it was a painter, visiting from Paris; certainly not, it was one of those travellers who had been staying at the inn. With limited staff, a variable client base and all those dark, shadowy corners, the auberge was fertile ground for sordid affairs.

Madeleine steadfastly refused to satisfy curiosity. Intrusion annoyed her. As her pregnancy advanced, she enjoyed goading the village gossip machine by baiting it with red herrings. She had been seduced that cold winter by a miller, Madeleine would tell some people, later adding that the offender had subsequently been crushed under his own millstone, which she felt to be suitable penance for his crime. Then, she would assure someone else that her seducer was a construction engineer, and that justice had been served when he fell from a bridge.

Accounts varied so widely that locals had to resign themselves to ignorance. And when all was said and done, Madeleine was a local girl, and village loyalty took precedence in such cases, particularly if the culprit was an outsider as people suspected. Nobody ostracised the cartwright's daughter, and Widow Guimbaud stood firmly by her cousin, allowing her to stay on at the inn and to see out her labour and convalescence there.

Finally, after months of struggling up and down the hefty, dark stairs to complete her chores under the weight of her swollen belly, at six o'clock in the morning on 23 September 1865, Madeleine gave birth to a baby girl.

That poignant first encounter between mother and child was intensified by circumstance. The baby had a strong little body, clear blue eyes and a well-defined chin – a tiny person already. Motherhood was familiar territory to Madeleine, but this time she was an only parent. There would be an inherent closeness to this helpless infant, a bond different from that which she had previously experienced. And yet now more than ever, Madeleine needed her child to be capable of surviving without her constant attention.

As Madeleine lay contemplating the new bundle of life in her arms, her mother's cousins François Peignaud and Clément Dony went to the mairie to make the requisite declaration of the child's birth, and a neighbour, Armand Chazeaud, agreed to join them to act as a witness. Peignaud and Dony had performed the same service after the birth of Marie-Alix. But the sisters' birth certificates had crucial differences. Where Marie-Alix was a Coulaud, Madeleine's new baby took her maiden name, Valadon. She was given the forename Marie-Clémentine, combining the names of the two godparents Madeleine already had in mind, Clément Masbey and Marie-Céline Coulaud. But those names could not efface the significance of two other words: 'father unknown'.

Renoir's DancerRenoir's Dancer by Catherine Hewitt. Copyright © 2018 by the author and reprinted by permission of St Martin's Press.