He obviously knocked her up with a kid by way of farewell gift, because grandfather Renan Astyanax was born exactly nine months after the sale. As soon as her pregnancy became evident, Corentine must have been thrown out by her family. And she would have had no choice but to leave for the mainland in order to find her beloved so he would formally recognise the child – except that in the meantime the war of 1870 broke out and he disappeared off to the front. Thus, it was Auguste, the fellow whose father had purchased the man as his son’s substitute, who legally recognised him, doubtless motivated by political idealism, but also and above all to make good the fact that a man had died in his stead.

Great-grandpa had cost the de Rigny family 8000 francs in 1870. I was no fool. The life of my forebear – some unknown kelp farmer – was not worth that price; that was just the amount his purchaser had the means to spend to avoid exposing his own son to the risk of being killed.

It is worth noting, as I discovered when researching the issue, that it was the only time in history – namely, on the eve of war in 1870 – that the poor have been worth so much. It was also in the nineteenth century, with the appearance of capitalism as we know it today, that philosophers, such as Engels and Marx in particular, started thinking about the concept of the reification of humans. Putting to one side the slaves of antiquity and the New World, who were not by law considered people, but rather chattels, the ability to set a price for a man was formalised with the enactment of the Gouvion-Saint-Cyr law in 1818 to regulate the practice of military substitution, which had been going on since 1797 but had resulted in numerous court cases and scandals.