‘Then they went to America. He didn’t have his beasts any more, so Wolfgang went to Barnum; the circuses there were spectacular. They had a daughter, Iris, and they always talked about this house as if it were, I don’t know, paradise on earth. Joséphine sold her house in the village, and she used the money to buy the house on the hill and all the surrounding land, over a hundred and twenty hectares of it. They used to go there from time to time in the fifties, and their grandchildren sometimes spent summers there afterwards. Anyway, their descendants are scattered all over the world, and they’ve been letting the house go for the last twenty years. In fact, Iris is the one who wants people to stay there; otherwise it will fall into ruin. Now she’s almost a hundred, and her children have decided to make some money from it.’

‘And would they sell it?’

‘Nobody would buy around here any more – it’s too isolated.’

‘Yes, but selling it would be good for all of them …’

‘Why, do you want to buy it?’

The dogs had got out of the car a while ago and were watching the three men from the other side of the windscreen, pawing the ground as if waiting for action.

‘Right, are we going to get them to sign your contracts?’

‘No, I’ll go on my own.’

‘Whatever you want … But take the dogs.’

‘All right.’

‘If they get too aggressive, just say “stop” or “heel”, but you have to be firm. They’ll back off straight away.’

Franck got out of the car holding the three rolled-up copies of the contract, gripping them tightly like a stick. The restless dogs realised it was finally time to find the prey they had been tracking for two hours, the prey that was hiding just hundreds of metres from there. Franck set out on the path and the dogs went on ahead, staying close to him. The path was now more of a narrow gully between two walls, a corridor covered with box trees and small maple trees. As he walked along it, he thought about the sheep that had thrown themselves off a hundred years ago. He imagined that the dogs running ahead of him were wolves or lions, animals intent on hunting down their prey, and now he was just like them. He was the one filling two kids with terror. They came to a gap in the bushes and the two dogs stopped, while Alpha came back towards him, waiting for an order. Franck carried on, and he finally spotted them in the distance, walking towards him. They hadn’t jumped; they looked worn out and were shivering; they were drenched, but mostly they were terrified of the two dogs that were coming towards them growling.

‘Control your dogs, for God’s sake!’ they shouted at Franck.