I had never been to an event of that nature before, quite simply because I had never felt the need nor had I ever been sufficiently curious, and also because I thought I would feel out of place. Like having a coffee in a luxury hotel; even if I could afford the 15-euro coffee, it would never enter my head to do so. Because I’d be scared they would turn me away at the door for not being appropriately dressed . . . Scared I would be made fun of because I don’t get the social codes of that milieu . . . In short, because I didn’t want to stand out like a sore thumb. Much like in that passage from Zola’s L’Assommoir where Gervaise’s wedding guests decide to go and visit the Louvre because the weather’sbad. The group of proles tip-toe through the halls of the museum, speaking in a whisper, and all the regular visitors give them scornful, condescending looks as if they were fairground freaks. People with unsightly bodies, undone by their labour and poor nutrition, causing offence in those refined environs by the mere act of wandering through them. The yellow vests of the nineteenth century.

All my prejudices were confirmed at the entrance, with the 40-euro ticket fee, which Hildegarde, Juliette and I were the only ones to pay, because everyone else was there by invitation.

As I consulted the prices in the catalogues of shots exhibited from galleries the world over, I thought to myself that here, finally, with the photograph as work of art, we had discovered a means of producing something of infinite value by virtue of the ability to reproduce as many copies of it as you want, for only the cost of the ink and paper. A money-making machine with neither central bank nor treasury. Much better than shares in a company, which necessarily involved whingeing employees at the end of the line. The holy grail of the capitalist dream. The trick was to rate the photo, and that was what all these cool types, beaming like so many spotlights directed at our failings and cheap clothes, had come to do in that great exhibition space.

‘Why have we come to look at photos of poor people and old people and awful-looking places?’ asked Juliette.

She was right: 80 per cent of the photos exhibited there had destitution as their subject matter. Not our own destitution: no dreadlocked punks with their dogs getting wasted in public squares, nor delusional schizophrenics being held upright by their filthy clothes. No vacant-looking immigrants left sitting on the median strip of the ring road, nor expressionless workers watching tyres burn. No bothersome controversial topics. Definitely not. No, just some pretty third-world deprivation. Some exotic squalor of the kind: just look at the sublime patina poverty forms on the faces of these miserable people.