But what if, for some reason I couldn’t begin to image, Antonopoulos did have it in for Maxime and me? I rummaged through my bag for my iPad then remembered I had left it in the rental car my mother had borrowed. I had to make do with my phone. I Googled the name, and the first mention of Alexis Antonopoulos I found was in a Point de Vue article about the marriage of Prince Carl Philip of Sweden in 2015. Antonopoulos, accompanied by his third wife, was among the happy few invited to the ceremony. As I continued clicking, I developed a sense of the man. Part-time businessman, part-time philanthropist, he lived a jet-setting life, dividing his time between California and the Cyclades. Vanity Fair mentioned that he regularly attended the annual amfAR Gala at Cannes, held during the Cannes Film Festival at the celebrated Eden-Roc hotel, which raised money for AIDS research. So Antonopoulos still had ties to the Côte d’Azur, but I could find nothing to link him directly to us.

Since I was making little headway, I decided to change tack. The fundamental cause of our fears was the forthcoming demolition of the old gym. This in turn was only a small part of the pharaonic project to completely remodel the campus, a mission that included the construction of a glass-and-steel tower, a state-of-the-art sports facility with an Olympic-size pool, and a landscaped garden.

This vast project was a recurring topic—people had been talking about it for the past twenty-five years—but before this, work had not begun because the lycée simply could not raise the necessary funds. From what I knew, the funding for the school had changed radically over its history. When it was founded, Saint-Exupéry had been a private institution, but later it had been brought into France’s national education system and was awarded regional grants. However, in recent years, the winds of revolution had swept through Saint-Ex, accompanied by the administrators’ firm desire to free the lycée from red tape and bureaucracy. Things accelerated after the election of François Hollande, and the battle between the lycée and the government had ended in a sort of secession. Saint-Ex had regained its autonomy, but in the process it had lost any right to public funds. The school fees rose sharply, but by my calculations, this new influx of cash would be a drop in the ocean compared to the money needed for the project. In order to break ground, the lycée’s administrators must have received a substantial private donation. I remembered what the headmistress had said this morning at the laying of the foundation stone. She had thanked the generous donors who had made it possible to embark on “the most ambitious building project in the history of this institution,” but she had been careful not to name names. It was a lead worth investigating.