As for the interview records of those people paid thirty times the minimum wage who didn’t even know the address of their place of work or of those comfortably housed in company apartments with parquetry floors and moulded ceilings for the rent of a place in a suburban housing estate – fans of the droit du seigneur or merely those who used their position to subsidise their restaurant meals, their taxis, their renovations or their electoral campaigns – we never took advantage of any of those sickening transcripts. Firstly, because with our overly recognisable physiques we would have been busted in no time when we showed our faces to carry out the transaction. And secondly, because the press didn’t even have the means to pay its journalists appropriately, so you can imagine what they’d pay their sources . . .

So, Hildegarde and I didn’t sell them, but from time to time we might have slipped them into an envelope addressed, for example, to Le Canard, or to Libération, Mediapart or to Le Figaro, depending on the political stripes of the subject of our opprobrium. We would do it just out of malicious delight, to see how it sowed the seeds of panic in people busy running around a stack of dominoes they had spent months building and which was in the process of collapsing before their very eyes. To watch the little black rectangles fall with no more effort required than that first flick, each domino bringing with it another one twice the size as it all came tumbling down. We had a blast watching these chain reactions of disgrace and the heads that went rolling into the sawdust. Enthralling soap operas that kept us on the edge of our seats for weeks. Better than a Netflix series. We had ourselves some pretty sweet TV dinners there on my girlfriend’s sofa, watching the news on loop.

Brest

14 July 1870

If there had not been any sign of life from Jules for the preceding three weeks, it was because he was having a fine time entertaining himself.

Ah, Brest!

Brest and her twenty-five thousand soldiers. Brest and her one thousand prostitutes. He was convinced that even the sea breeze in Brest had something of a whiff of vulva.

When there had been discussion of someone being sent off to find a man to buy for his numbskull of a brother-in-law, he had immediately volunteered, spying an opportunity to get away from the de Rigny family. He had suggested Toulon, but his wife, Berthe, had vetoed that idea, saying the place was too dangerous. So, on the pretext of having friends there, he had proposed Brest, which was quite some distance from Paris yet had a direct train connection.