Be that as it may, she had now been dead for four days and I had become rich. Unimaginably rich. And because the rich are always in a hurry, I had more important things to do than hang around a cemetery. Our plane was leaving in six hours for our new home in the tax haven that is the British Virgin Islands – and the following Monday, because Monday’s always a good day to start bringing about the end of the world, we would get to work.

Standing outside that vault, which the gravediggers no longer even bothered to seal given that the de Rignys were falling like flies (I’m not kidding, six in less than a year), I thought about our common forebear, Auguste. Whether his life story as I recount it in these pages reflects the life he truly lived, and whether his character was as I describe it is really neither here nor there.

Setting down those few months in the life of that appealing, yet slightly clueless young man is a way of rendering him flesh and blood, of giving him the immortality he deserves as a thank you for his gesture to my family. A way of extracting him from ‘the dark backward and abysm of time’, as Shakespeare would say. This way he’ll find himself in the company of some other faithful fellows who may not exist in real life, but rather appear in those nineteenth-century novels that fashioned my political thinking and made me who I am.

Saint-Germain-en-Laye

18 January 1870

Auguste had been sitting on the edge of his bed for more than an hour, eyes fixed on this costly novelty item available in the department stores, this thing called an alarm clock, which his aunt Clothilde had given him for his twentieth birthday.

Because we all know there will never be enough roosters in Paris to rouse you from your sleep, she had quipped in the note on the little card attached to the parcel.

It consisted of a clock which had been mounted inside a finely worked case portraying birds of paradise. Pondering the invention, the young man thought sadly how it would in many respects wreak havoc with the habits of all those night owls who, like him, struggled to rise in the morning. The thing was designed to set off a bell at a particular predetermined moment. In addition to the hands indicating hours and minutes, a special hand, which one would set the previous evening, marked the time to rise. Auguste had set that hand at the number seven, one hour prior to the time indicated on his summons to attend the draw.