And who were France’s allies now against the kaiser’s German threat? The English, linked to France by the Entente Cordiale, together with the Russians, who feared the kaiser too.

Wherever one looked in the streets of old Paris, from the ruins of the medieval walls to Notre Dame, to the bleak grandeur of Les Invalides, it was always the same story: Men called to glory, or to defend la patrie; men killed, in many thousands. The struggle for power, and, intermittently, the attempt to find a balance of power among the nations, until the peace broke down once again.

Would his own generation do any better? he wondered.

Luc Gascon was as good as his word. He came by during the evening with the address of Le Sourd’s workplace, a printer’s on the edge of Belleville, and even the days of the week when he might be found there.

Roland set out late the following morning. His plan was simple. He would have lunch at Maxim’s. After that, he would go and interview Le Sourd. The late afternoon and evening he left open. If things went wrong, Le Sourd might have killed him by then. Or he Le Sourd. In either case the evening might be disrupted. No point in making plans one might not keep.

Before he set out, he discovered a small problem. His service revolver was not easy to conceal. Although it fit into the deep pocket in his outer coat, it might be discovered when he took off his coat at Maxim’s. The alternative was to put the gun in an attaché case.

But this presented a social difficulty. For just as no gentleman in Europe would be seen carrying a parcel if he could avoid it—there were servants, or in worse cases women, for that—even an attaché case, in the mind of Roland de Cygne, made one look too like a businessman, instead of an aristocrat. Had he been in uniform on his way to a staff meeting, that would be an entirely different matter; but he was going to Maxim’s for lunch.

It took him several minutes to think about it. If he’d taken his own conveyance, he could have left the revolver there. His father’s jaunty carriage was still in the coach house, though without horses or coachman, and Roland had been thinking of buying himself a handsome motor car, a Daimler perhaps. But until he did so, he had no transport, so he’d have to take a cab. Once he got to the restaurant, he’d leave the case at the hat and coat counter, of course, and with luck no one he knew would see him arriving with it. He wondered whether, after lunch, he could discreetly remove the revolver, slip it into his coat pocket, and leave the case at Maxim’s to be picked up later. For if Le Sourd by any chance killed him, the thought of the newspapers reporting that his body had been found with an attaché case was highly irksome.