Patrick sniggers. He crushes the peanut shells between his fingers, takes out the nuts, and crunches them two by two. A heap of stringy shells piles up in the ashtray, about to spill over. Every so often he gives the window a furtive glance, looking out despite himself for Céline’s outline, although she doesn’t reappear. Manuel tries to present a calmer face to his wife, his mate and his mate’s wife. He tells himself that Séverine is prettier than Valérie and her extra kilos, blonde hair cut across her forehead and cheap drop earrings. It’s a pleasant thought. He tells himself it feels good to be here, at the end of a working day – he almost convinces himself. He banishes his father, he banishes his daughter. He drinks a little too quickly.

You can still hear the TV through the open doors and windows, snippets of dreadful and spectacular news which, at first sight, don’t seem to concern the masses. Bombs have razed several villages in the Middle East to the ground; some shareholders have collected millions of euros’ worth of dividends; some trade unionists are trying to reach an agreement with the owners of a large company to avoid two thousand redundancies.

“Should let them all die,” Manuel says.

“Or make them live on the minimum wage,” Valérie suggests. Valérie’s sweet. Well, not always, but she still has a teacher’s tendency, a stand against violence, even though she’s the first to get it smack in the face. Everybody knows. Everybody keeps quiet about it because it doesn’t happen very often, Patrick’s not a bad sort, and life isn’t easy for anybody. Besides, when she starts, when things start sizzling between them, it’s not like she just stands there with her arms crossed.

The news carries on: a mother has found her daughter after an absence of twenty years. An old singer is dead. A radicalized cell on the outskirts of Paris has been dismantled. A refugee camp has been set fire to in the east. The state of emergency has been extended.