What outraged me still further was the scant regard shown for the ocean. To me, the sea is no minor matter. My entire childhood was steeped in it and, wherever I am, I feel suffused by it. The sound of the ocean, the incessant noise of the billions of pebbles rolling around on top of each other, the sound of the waves bashing against the seawall of the port: I can still hear it all in my sleep. Nobody ever thinks about protecting the sea and the animals that live in it from unscrupulous rotten-to-the core swine like de Rigny and his offspring. If nobody stops these people, they’ll continue to appropriate what little still remains for the taking before it all disappears while penniless environmental crusaders desperately try in vain to save what can still be saved.

Finally, what revolted me most of all was my own frustration, my inability to understand the motivations driving these businessmen to destroy our children’s future just to earn a bit more money, when they had stockpiled enough to support another four hundred generations. What goal were they pursuing by ruining the lives of those who have next to nothing by taking what little they still had? Were they doing it for laughs? To be able to tell themselves they were the best? For the drunken ecstasy prompted by the suffering and destruction?

Was this the situation Jesus was anticipating when he said, in a great moment of irony, for which he is not typically known: For whoever has, to him more will be given, and he will have abundance: but whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken away from him?

The response to all these questions was even more distressing than one might imagine: the de Rignys, while making ever more money, were not pursuing any particular objectives, the accumulation of wealth being for them just a process. Having made their fortune in the nineteenth century, the capitalist dynamic created a snowball effect. The more significant their total net worth, the more money they amassed when they took it for a whirl on the financial markets. And the few extravagances they shouted themselves with their enormous dividends – the yacht, the property in the what’s-it-called islands built by the latest trendy architect, the clothes, the jewels, the paintings, and the god knows whatever else – were certainly not about to prevent them reinvesting it to make even more.

It was a phenomenon that had fed off itself for a century and a half and which, by its very nature, was going to continue to grow and grow until a little lame beetle came to insert herself inopportunely into its workings.