For my part, I had no objection to sex being subject to market forces. There were many ways of acquiring money, honest and dishonest, cerebral or, by contrast, brutally physical. It was possible to make money using one's intellect, talent, strength or courage, even one's beauty; it was also possible to acquire money through a banal stoke of luck. Most often, money was acquired through inheritance, as in my case; the problem of how it had been earned fell to the previous generation. Many very different people had acquired money on this earth: former top athletes, gangsters, artists, models, actors; a great number of entrepreneurs and talented financiers; a number of engineers, too, more rarely a few inventors. Money was sometimes acquired mechanically, by simple accumulation; or, on the other hand, by some audacious coup crowned with success. There was no great logic to it, but the possibilities were endless. By contrast, the criteria for sexual selection were unduly simple: they consisted merely of youth and physical beauty. These features had a price, certainly, but not an infinite price. The situation, of course, had been very different in earlier centuries, at a time when sex was essentially linked to reproduction. To maintain the genetic value of the species, humanity was compelled seriously to take into account criteria like health, strength, youth and physical prowess —of which beauty was merely a handy indicator. Nowadays, the order of things had changed: beauty had retained all of its value, but that value was now something marketable, narcissistic. If sex was really to come into the category of tradable commodities, the best solution was probably to involve money, that universal mediator which already made it possible to assure an exact equivalence between intelligence, talent and technical competence; which had already made it possible to assure a perfect standardisation of opinions, tastes and lifestyles. Unlike the aristocracy, the rich made no claim to being different in kind from the rest of the population; they simply claimed to be richer. Essentially abstract, money was a concept in which neither race, physical appearance, age, intelligence nor distinction played any part, nothing in fact, but money. My European ancestors had worked hard for several centuries; they had sought to dominate, then to transform the world, and, to a certain extent they had succeeded. They had done so out of economic self-interest, out of a taste for work, but also because they believed in the superiority of their civilisation: they had invented dreams, progress, Utopia, the future. Their sense of a mission to civilise had disappeared in the course of the twentieth century. Europeans, at least some of them, continued to work, and sometimes to work hard, but they did so for money, or from a neurotic attachment to their work; the innocent sense of their natural right to dominate the world and direct the path of history had disappeared. As a consequence of their accumulated efforts, Europe remained a wealthy continent; those qualities of intelligence and determination manifested by my ancestors I had manifestly lost. As a wealthy European, I could obtain food and the services of women more cheaply in other countries; as a decadent European, conscious of my approaching death, and given over entirely to selfishness, I could see no reason to deprive myself of such things. I was aware, however, that such a situation was barely tenable, that people like me were incapable of ensuring the survival of a society, perhaps more simply we were unworthy of life. Mutations would occur, were already occurring, but I found it difficult to feel truly concerned; my only genuine motivation was to get the hell out of this shithole as quickly as possible. November was cold, bleak; I hadn't been reading Auguste Comte that much recently. My great diversion when Valerie was out consisted of watching the movement of the clouds through the picture window. Immense flocks of starlings formed over Gentilly in the late afternoon, describing inclined planes and spirals in the sky; I was quite tempted to ascribe meaning to them, to interpret them as the heralds of an apocalypse.