He would have to have been blind not to notice the hordes of scruffy children left entirely to their own devices, the young girls being prostituted, the single mothers who’d been impregnated by their master then dismissed from their position, their sickly offspring clinging to their skirts, all of them doing their best to linger on the edge of that area where they might rub up against the wealthy and make off with a few coins.

He would have to have been a fool not to realise that something in society was not functioning as it should.

To display sensitivity to the distress of the poor in the face of one’s own good fortune was a matter fraught with complications, and one his own family was evidently incapable of comprehending, but Auguste found himself seduced by the challenge. He could not deny his own social status and the gap that might exist between himself and the proletariat whose cause he was espousing; nonetheless, he was keen to find a way to at least bridge that gap, through some form of exchange or contact, even if he were unable to fill it entirely.

He was convinced it required people such as himself to consider how the most deprived might access an education, and most importantly how to assist them in freeing themselves of the Church . . . convinced that to be a member of the affluent classes would prevent him neither from thinking nor theorising in the name of those who were in economically too fragile a state to rise up in revolt: Étienne de la Boétie, Thoreau, Marx, Engels . . . they were all sons of the bourgeoisie, and yet they expounded dazzling notions of brotherly solidarity.

To be able to philosophise at length about the destiny of mankind! All well and good, except that his conscription problem was casting a shadow over his entire future, and preventing him from making any sort of plans whatsoever. It was becoming an obsession. It had got to the point where he could no longer spend time with young people his age without wondering what arrangements they had made . . . however, short of having the audacity to ask them outright, the topic of purchasing a man, an insurmountable paradox for a socialist, proved an impossible one to broach. Whenever he saw his family – itself no sinecure – it was worse: every conversation around the dinner table seemed to lead in one direction only: conscription. They would bring up some person or other and thoughts would turn immediately to their son and thus to his departure or to his exemption. They would start talking about the year ahead and would have to contemplate Auguste’s absence, or worse his death, and there would be sobbing.

It felt as if he were damned.

He pondered all this as he took in the squalid hovels, their façades blackened by soot, rags drying in the windows.