In a few minutes I had identified almost all of them. There was the exquisitely wealthy centenarian maintaining her daughter Marianne and her granddaughter Adrienne, a jet-setting art photographer who, judging by her social media pages, appeared to be constantly coked up, wearing hyper-branded threads, and very, very stupid. In the Super Prick’s family, leaving aside the dead girlfriend, there was the father as well as the son, Pierre-Alexandre, both of them working for Oilofina and under investigation before the courts in the matter concerning the contamination of African waste sites, Pierre-Alexandre being recently resident in the Abidjan prison, Maca. Only Pierre eluded my investigative efforts, as I was unable to find the slightest trace of him on the internet.

The family owned numerous properties and a very luxurious 35-metre yacht, the Sunday Morning, whose every angle could be admired on photographer Adrienne’s Instagram account, which featured some very fancy parties. When you scrolled through her photos, you could see the whole family took advantage of it, or had at some point, even the dead girlfriend . . . And even the hipster dude with glasses whom I’d met, pissed, at the Kastel Bar – who, despite his left-leaning politics and his humanitarian aid work, nonetheless seemed right at home. Only Marianne, Adrienne’s mother, caught in the background of those few shots, gazing into the distance through her squinting alcoholic’s eyes, didn’t really seem to be enjoying herself.

Paris

14 July 1870

For the second time that day Auguste had rushed to the newspaper stand at the end of his street, directly opposite the building site of the new Opera, in order to stay abreast of the latest developments in the saga of the Spanish throne and its corollary: war.

Forty-eight hours earlier, to appease France’s fears of being encircled by Prussian monarchies, Kaiser Wilhelm I, who was taking the waters at Ems, had given his assurance in reply to the enquiry of the French Ambassador that his cousin, Prince Leopold of the House of Hohenzollern, would once and for all be withdrawing his claim to the throne.

Auguste had breathed again as he saw the spectre of conflict between France and Prussia dissipating.