These days there is still a monetary value to human life, but its calculation no longer corresponds so directly to the laws of supply and demand. Some fix it at one hundred and twenty times a country’s per capita GDP. By this method of calculation, one French person is worth 5 millionUS dollars, an American is worth 6.5 million and an Eritrean is worth 70,000: that is, more or less the cost of the 4WD that could potentially crush him in a rally. Other methods base it on two concepts: the potential usefulness of an individual and the amount of money a society is prepared to fork out in order to save a life. Using these calculations, one French person would be worth around 3 million, whereas an Eritrean, well, let’s just say politely that they’re invaluable. Once such a figure is fixed, nation-states can make trade-offs with respect to health-care expenditure that would not, therefore, involve rare conditions such as the one which my friend Hildegarde suffers from. Same thing can be said for public works. Behind every planning development – for example, an intersection or a new level crossing – behind every piece of infrastructure that might preserve a life, there is a necessary allocation of monetary value to that life.

In our case, it would appear that Auguste de Rigny saw his family attribute to him a future value that justified him agreeing to big money being paid to avoid the risk involved – and his father hadn’t thrown his money away, because in purchasing my forebear, he probably succeeded in saving his son’s life in the lamentable slaughter which the war of 1870 proved to be.

What was this ever-so-young man trying to say by waving at me from the past so I would not forget him? What had he done with his life? The guilt he might have felt because an unlikely kelp farmer had died in his place in no way diminished the impact of his actions, given that in 1870 you would not have burdened yourself with such details. Rather, for a poor man to die in a rich man’s place would have been considered a fair manifestation of the cosmic order of things. Even if I couldn’t ever really know him, I enjoyed wondering . . .

And, of course, it was fairly impressive to have in your hands your great-grandfather’s deed of sale. Poor Botquelen! Dead like a dog on the side of a road. Lost to time, with nothing remaining of him but ill-defined traces. A description tossed off by a provincial notary and a little boy who didn’t even bear his name, and here I was, the only person aware of the connection. While we’re at it, about my grandfather, the old cripple perched on his barrel – there’s another generation of cannon fodder, of organic reserves to which France has so generously helped itself. Fate has been peculiarly persistent in this family.

Paris

19 September 1870