‘Agreed, except that the family doesn’t want to talk about it. So, except for Marianne, there’s nobody left. And then when we put out an alert on the internet, we came across your father’s death notice and as it’s such an unusual name they sent me here to consult his records, just in case. I traced the family back to a re-transcription of the marriage certificate of your grandfather Renan with his wife, Rose, on which the name Auguste de Rigny is noted as the father of the groom. As all the Parisian records prior to June 1871 went up in smoke, we were unaware of the existence of this direct descendent.’

‘I have that certificate. It was in my father’s papers.’

‘So who’s Corentine Malgorn?’

‘A damn fine woman. Her photo’s on a vault in the cemetery. You can’t miss it, it’s the most impressive one.’

‘So then you must be the great-granddaughter of Auguste de Rigny, the youngest-known beneficiary after Marianne and her twin brother who can’t be found.’

‘If you say so! Pleased to meet you. I’m Blanche, I’m thirty-eight years old and I have a ten-year-old daughter called Juliette. Voilà. And contrary to any ideas you might get from the way I look, I’m not suffering from any sort of degenerative illness. My ninety-three-year-old great-aunt is in great shape and the only reason my father died recently is because he drowned himself, otherwise he, too, would be in good form. You should organise a cousins’ get-together, a cousinade as we say around here, so we can introduce ourselves to each other.’

He ignored my comment.

‘My board has just asked me to find you, so we’re in luck, seeing as you’re here. There’s something they want to ask you, even if it’s a little delicate . . .’

‘Feel free,’ I said with a big smile.

‘My bosses want me to ask you the following question, off the record: if there should be some fresh, unexpected misfortune, what would your intentions be vis-à-vis the trust?’

‘It involves some tax optimisation thing on an island paradise with palm trees, right?’

‘Yes, in the British Virgin Islands.’

‘If this family pays people to look after their wealth and those people take it upon themselves to send somebody all this way, just to consult the births, deaths and marriages register, that must mean we’re talking about enormous sums of money, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m really fond of island life. That’s what you should tell your bosses. Maybe that’ll make them feel better . . .’

Paris

18 March 1871

A few days earlier, on the occasion of the Prussian parade down the Champs-Élysées, Jules Vallès had published an editorial in Le Cri du Peuple which had moved Auguste to his core.