Auguste found all these debates at the Café Madrid intellectually stimulating, and a world apart from the opinions of his own family, whose construction interests had, for the time being, tanked. Which was to say that, the last he had heard, his brother Ferdinand was spending every Sunday afternoon in the salon of the Reinach family, close friends of Adolphe Thiers, doubtless seeking goodness knows what form of advantage, almost certainly involving the accumulation of more wealth. It would definitely not be a first, because it was Thiers himself, when he was Minister for Public Works, who had championed the planned railway between Paris and Saint-Germain, and who had awarded the contract for the construction of the stations to his grandfather, and then to his father.

When the journalist from Le Réveil decamped, Auguste pulled up a chair at a table with Perrachon and Trousselier, a tall, dark-haired medical student with an enormous nose hanging over his walrus-like moustache.

These two friends from the university were a couple of years older than Auguste and had come of age when the previous conscription laws had still been in force, narrowly managing to take advantage of the regime of exemption from military service in return for payment of a sum of money. Their parents had paid what they’d had to in order for their respective sons to be exempted from military service and that had been the end of the matter. They were his two closest friends; he felt he could trust them.

‘Where did you pull that from, that business about the end of the world?’ asked Perrachon.

‘From one of our Philosophy profs, a man from Alsace who translated one of Marx’s texts, The Fetishism of Commodities, for us. It’s a terrifyingly prophetic text about the mechanisms of accumulation and concentration of wealth. And with my family busy trying to buy me a man, the supposed philosopher in me is currently spending quite some time reflecting on the issue of wealth,’ said Auguste, ironically.

‘They’re reporting in La Marseillaise that Bismarck is plotting with Kaiser Wilhelm to install a Prussian cousin on the Spanish throne because he wants to prod the French into declaring war against him,’ commented Perrachon.

‘Don’t I know it; I’m reading the papers twice a day and not sleeping a wink.’

Trousselier interrupted to reassure his friend.

‘Well, your sacrifice won’t make a jot of difference when it comes to this war, which is entirely the work of speculators on both sides.’

‘As you might imagine, this war is the last thing I want, but should I refuse to go, I’ll be executed.’

‘Rest assured you’re not the only one in your class to find yourself in a jam. On Saturday morning I was woken by the heart-wrenching cries of my neighbour across the landing, who was clinging to her son as the soldiers came to round him up. His father stood there on the doorstep, his arms dangling slack at his sides, crushed by guilt at not having found a solution. A few months earlier he had paid half the price, namely 5000 francs, to a dealer in human flesh for a substitute who was refused admission on the grounds of tuberculosis just as he was to enlist: the medical certificate had been faked!’