To see the wealthy of Paris reduced to eating basic preserves, what irony ... Such dreadful times. The poor were not standing awestruck outside the shops, they had neither the time nor the means. While you, Sirs, conversed at Brébant’s, Jacques Everyman was off to the ramparts, often on an empty stomach ... And if, by some misfortune, he had drunk a glass of doctored wine, feeling cold and hungry, and was a little merrier than usual as a result, he was called a drunkard.

This short paragraph both upset and alarmed me because there was the proof – self-evident – that nothing had changed one iota in the last one hundred and fifty years. Social groups continued to despise one another when the greatest challenge in the history of humanity was right there in front of us, namely that a share of the world’s wealth no longer be used to make people richer, but rather to correct the harm to the environment caused by their actions so as to stop the situation getting worse.

When I shared my thoughts with Hildegarde, she replied very serenely that for 3 million years humans had cooperated in times of stress, regardless of their social status, and that quite on the contrary everything would work out very well. All you had to do was look at how people had behaved during times of great catastrophe: self-organisation, orderliness, mutual assistance and altruism always came to the fore, regardless of social background. Well, yes, that’s true, but to get to that point, things had to be really very bad indeed.

How I loved her, that Hildegarde.

Hildegarde and her electronic ankle tag.

Since misfortunes never just happen as a one-off, I got a call from Granny Soize one evening: my father had not returned from his outing at sea. As I hung up, I said to myself, ‘Well then, there we go, it’s happened!’

It’s often how they finish up, the old sailors on the island. One morning, despite the swell, they go out fishing and because they’re stiff with arthritis they topple overboard as they’re bringing up their pots. They no longer have the strength to haul themselves from the water to reach their boat’s step ladder, they exhaust themselves and die of hypothermia. We all know they do it deliberately, even if we never talk about it among ourselves. They know that that’s how it’ll end one day, because they go out in any conditions with no telephone, no VFI digital navigation system, in unseaworthy vessels, but they don’t give a toss: anything rather than dying on shore in a hospital bed.

I told Juliette the news. ‘Grandpa has disappeared at sea and I don’t think they’re going to find him.’ She asked me if I was sad. I replied no.