— Why would I find that brutal? You’re asking the same question as before, aren’t you? (Another smile.) And without wishing to vex you, it is equally badly put. Obviously I do not wish anyone dead. How could I wish for someone to be crushed at sea by the five hundred tons of a ferry, or to be shot on a café terrace in front of his fiancée, or for a bomb to explode under his car straight after he’s dropped off his children at school? Who could wish, approve or order such misfortune? Certainly not an old man who wishes only to live in peace. Do not seek evil on my part. Seek it in men who are pursuing a different agenda, a strange need for power, for money, for women. Here in Corsica, power, money and women often depend upon the goods that you possess, real estate, land and stone. So if those men, rather than contenting themselves with what life has entrusted to them, prefer to covet or seize or speculate, what can I do about it? What can I do if they only find their lives interesting when they’re in danger, like those lunatics who enjoy high-risk sports? As if they could defy the natural order of things. Do we accuse the wave of killing the foolhardy surfer? The crumbling rock of betraying the incautious climber? The hairpin bend of killing the impatient driver?

Corse-Matin: Thank you, Monsieur Idrissi, I think I can read between the lines of what you’re saying. Given such covetousness, are you not concerned – since you own, I’m sorry, since you have been entrusted with, so much property – that someone might wish to dispossess you of it? Put more prosaically, that they might want to kill you?

— No, Monsieur Palazzo. No. (A brief silence.) I might legitimately be worried if I possessed something that I might lose. But since I am only a guardian, if I should fall, then another man would take my place, and another after that, or a woman for that matter, a friend, a relative, any man or any woman who shared the same values, the same code of honour as myself. Members of my family, and in my family I include people who are not of my own blood, who would know what to do should some misfortune one day befall me. (A long silence this time.) Just as I would should misfortune one day befall them.

Corse-Matin: Vendettas. Do you agree with them? Can I sum up your reply using that word?