AT SOME POINT in my childhood, I was nicknamed “Cow Pie.” Although I would remain Cow Pie to my six brothers and sisters, I fought back, and my earliest concentrated efforts of imagination were dedicated to finding equally dignified monikers for them. Even though they didn’t always call me by that name, it was worse to know that I was also Cow Pie to my parents. I was a son who was neither good nor bad and who would never amount to much. You won’t hear me telling fond, nostalgic stories about my youth, and if there is a period in my life upon which I turned the page without regrets, it would definitely be my childhood.

The fifth in a family of seven children, I was not born under a lucky star. Parents usually prefer their older children. And if the younger brother often triumphs in fairy tales, in real life he is usually met with indifference, receiving neither attention, nor kindness, nor much of anything at all. I was no exception to this rule; I was neither the first nor the last and my grades in school were just as middling—as far from the leader of the class as from the dunce’s inexplicable prestige. My parents didn’t know what to do with me—I wasn’t an intellectual, but I didn’t seem fit to be a laborer. This may be the reason I became a gardener—a profession defined more by a place than by any one particular activity. But at the risk of disappointing some, I have to admit that I never thought I would grow up to be a gardener. I didn’t imagine becoming anything when I was a teenager. To a certain extent, I still wonder what I want to do with my life today. When I was sixteen, I took up photography as a hobby. The equipment put a serious strain on my limited budget and I started working as a gardener to be able to pay for my first reflex camera. During that summer, I rode down the country roads west of Paris on an old motorized bike that had once belonged to my mother. More bike than motor, it never went uphill without stalling. I mowed, weeded gardens, and watered lawns for pay when neighbors were on vacation. I didn’t especially enjoy the work, but what else was I to do? I was too shy and immature to have worked as a clerk or a waiter—I would have never dared to approach the clients, particularly the women. My mother had dismissed the possibility of babysitting, repeating one of her favorite phrases, “If we squeezed your nose, my boy, milk would still come out.” In other words, I was no figure of virile authority. Those words may have seemed harmless to her, but they stung in my memory long afterward. I never fought back or tried to change the harmless role in which my family so enjoyed casting me—preferring instead to just accentuate it. To the point that when I received my first driving license, I handed the clerk behind the counter the only photo I had of myself—taken when I was exactly thirteen years old. Never a rebel, I was at most a joker. This is the reason that my parents finally gave up and enrolled me in horticultural school. I didn’t resist, but I never had what others refer to as “a calling.”

My parents were of a generation and class where one didn’t choose whether to have children. Ours was an old-fashioned Catholic family, and in the 1950s, children just arrived “by chance,” always at the worst moment. I don’t think my mother wanted to have so many children. I remember the day I discovered a photo of her in her youth—smiling, in a summer dress—happy in a way I had never seen her. She had been very beautiful—the essence of beauty—but maybe all little boys think their mothers are beautiful. At any rate, she certainly seemed to have expected a different sort of life when she married my father, a dashing man with a decent job. But the payments on our house soon ate up all of my father’s resources and there was nothing left at the end of the month to pay for any extras. My mother came from a humble background and had never dreamed of Ferraris or vacations in Chamonix, but I think she would have liked to be able to stop counting pennies, pregnancies, and the passing years. Instead of champagne and roses, she found herself in a tiny suburban house paid for with every last franc, burdened with seven children who had stolen her youth, and an aging husband born before the First World War. Looking back, it’s hard to reproach her for a lack of motherly love. When I see young mothers in awe of their offspring, cuddling their babies and covering them in kisses, I always think back to how I never knew my mother’s touch, how I never held her in my arms, even on the day that my father died. She was never tender toward her children or toward herself. Unlike for her, life has given me the opportunity to stop and take notice. In spite of it all, I will always be indebted to her for bringing me into the world.

I still love photography. When I think back to my adolescence, it’s the images that come first—the story of my family is a photo album. I always imagine my father the same way: a straight-backed little man, polite and elegant, a mix between the French actor Pierre Fresnay and Fred Astaire. The son of a successful engineer trained at the prestigious Ecole Polytechnique, he had a martial air about him, even when he left the house in the morning to do his rounds as an inspector for the French welfare system. We were never close. There was a generation gap, of course: my father was born in 1912 and was already forty-five by the time I came along. In even my earliest memories he is already an aging man. In later years he was always extremely distant. Out of stupid social convention, he required that we use the formal vous instead of the more familiar tu—I think it was Fresnay, in fact, who says in one of his movies, “I say vous to my father and my wife.” It was already old-fashioned and vaguely ridiculous to do so in the 1940s—but ten years after the student uprisings and social shifts of May 1968, the formal vous was still the law with which Jacques Baraton reigned over his family.

I will admit, however, that we did live much closer to bourgeois Versailles than to the leftist hotbed of Nanterre farther to the north. My father regularly waxed rhapsodic over “his” successful son, a mathematician who took great pleasure in torturing my sisters and me with his success—such is the prerogative of older children. I was not spared any of childhood’s frustrations, from the short pants and heavy shoes that I was made to wear until the age of sixteen, to a painful and useless set of braces. My true birth happened at Versailles, on a very hot day in 1976—and my real family is the one that I created over the following years in the shade of the gardens where I put down roots.

In the gray memories of my slug-like youth, a single figure remains haloed in a benevolent glow: my grandfather and his garden in Celle-Saint-Cloud, my childhood Eden. Going to my grandparents’ house was always a treat. If my memories of their long-gone, ramshackle, little wood-frame house are cloudy, I can still distinctly see the garden that was my grandfather’s pride. There was a small iron gate, two round flower beds that I used to admire, the clematis clambering over its pergola, and the magnificent potager where my grandfather grew rows of leeks standing at attention and heads of lettuce the taste of which supposedly had a hint of hazelnut. There was also a cherry tree and a magnificent damson plum. I owe my earliest romantic successes to that plum tree. During the summer, I would take my conquests to pick plums and steal a kiss instead. Gardens lend themselves to romance, and after more than thirty years as a gardener, I’m even convinced that a garden’s capacity for inspiring romance should be a criterion for evaluation in terms of horticultural excellence. A garden capable of attracting lovers is a success. Who would declare their love in the arid, monotonous monochrome of the Tuileries, where it feels as though one is under perpetual surveillance? To me, this is the antithesis of a beautiful garden.

Versailles is packed with couples looking to shelter their affairs within a grove of trees, and when I see these couples, I experience professional satisfaction, not tenderness. The park’s guards however, pursue them with childish, sadistic delight. In a way, the hunt for romantic couples has replaced the hunt for wild game—I must admit I greatly prefer the substitution. Sometimes the guards will call us to show off a catch. I always answer their calls to make sure that the situation isn’t too seedy or tragic, but also because the story is often rather amusing. A few years ago, security called, extending a stern invitation to help them “clean up” the lawn behind the Grand Trianon. We discreetly made our way to the spot where two teenagers were engaged in an act that was quite visibly new to them. Settled down just behind the central allée on the broad lawn leading to the Gally Farm, they had chosen a poor spot. The young man was applying himself in a clumsy, gulping motion between the young woman’s legs. The guard blew his whistle and the young man raised his head, just as the girl, in a natural reflex, snapped her knees together, nearly strangling her lover. I could barely breathe I was laughing so hard. The guards chased them off, of course, but I was proud to know that my park had served as their Garden of Eden.

But back to my first garden, the foundation of so much that would later become important to me—or rather, back to its creator, my grandfather. I’m not well informed about the psychological reasoning behind the rule—something I voluntarily leave to the experts—but generally, if you detest your parents and find them clichéd and conventional, you only have to jump a generation for conformity to become reassuring. The more your grandfather is the very picture of a grandfather, the more your devotion to the man is boundless. Mine was the essence of a grandfather beyond reason—a drippy nose, knee-high boots, a blue apron, a straw hat, and a pair of pruning shears always in hand. He was a model gardener that, out of respect (or fear of ridicule), I refuse to become.

Émile Crochard did not have an easy life. Born to unknown parents, he had been adopted by a couple of Belgian carnival workers and was selling gingerbread in itinerant village fairs before he even knew how to read. (I hate carnivals—I find them sad and vulgar.) The Second World War left him with a severe hand injury (all of the tendons cut) and an extreme hatred of Germans. I can still see him, his right hand prudishly folded out of sight, the dead branch of his ancient body. I’m not sure how he became a violin maker, but I know that when he was too old to work anymore, the same boss who had taught him his trade gave him only a day’s salary to serve as his retirement fund. The need to put food on the table, in the very simplest sense of the phrase, brought about the birth of his model garden. The cut flowers and clematis came later.

Today our gardens, and Versailles was a precursor in this sense, are largely ornamental ones—extra rooms built outside the home. We furnish them with lounging chairs and barbecues, or even a swimming pool. The vegetable garden, if one exists, is largely there to allow the lady of the house to play farmer like Marie Antoinette before her. If she has any concerns about her potatoes and carrots, or more frequently, her cherry tomatoes (more stylish, expensive, and less nourishing—the very epitome of useless food), it’s more out of pride than the fear of not being able to feed her family. This type of gardener is proud of having planted a “kiwi-tree” on the balcony of her two-room Parisian apartment. I promise to hang myself from that supposed kiwi-tree if it survives its new owner! None of this is reprehensible or even regrettable and I wouldn’t want anybody to suffer a food shortage. But a good gardener should never lose sight of the fact that gardening is a perpetual balancing act of pleasure and necessity. The healthiest plants are obtained by those who know and respect the laws of nature. This was how La Quintinie, one of Louis XIV’s master gardeners, succeeded in growing orange trees at Versailles without having to move them inside for the winter—something which is usually necessary in the climate of northern France. To protect his trees from the cold, La Quintinie surrounded them with little cages of wood and glass. To give them the sunshine necessary for fruit to develop he invented miniature greenhouses. If, to satisfy a royal caprice, a master gardener managed to overcome the laws of nature, it was because he understood them so well.

I have long tried, in vain, to rediscover the variety of clematis that once grew in my grandfather’s garden. He died too soon for me to be able to tell him how much I admired him, how much I feel indebted to him. He never called me Cow Pie, and even though he didn’t have the time to teach me all of the things he knew, he had a real passion for what would later become my life’s work. I wanted him to be proud of me because I was proud of him. He was an extremely peaceful man, who knew how to show his authority without ever raising his voice—and he needed that authority when faced with my thundering grandmother who unflinchingly slaughtered chickens and rabbits. My sister and I had secretly nicknamed her “Big Bertha.” She once gave us a baby chick that we named Fifi, as we did all of our pets. Six months later, Fifi ended up on our dinner plates, cooked with loving care by my triumphant grandmother. She was tough in the way peasant women are, just as my grandfather was gentle the way I like to think that gardeners are. A charming man, he indirectly passed his interests on to me. Even though he never openly encouraged me to become a gardener—he was too gentle to tell people what they should do—he showed me the way. In short, he understood me before I did. When I feel proud about what I’m doing today, it’s in thinking back to him.

After the big storm, I was given all sorts of awards: Chevalier, and then Officer of Agricultural Merit, Chevalier of the National Order of Merit, Chevalier of Arts and Letters, the Silver Medal of the Society of Sciences and Encouragment … At present, I have more decorations than a Christmas tree. It seems that I have become part of the Republic’s aristocracy, and at every official ceremony, I think of Émile Crochard, who struggled and suffered so much for France, and who well deserved a medal. These signs of official respect are incidental, in my eyes, mostly due to the circumstances in which I found myself rather than my merit. Still, there is one award I hope to eventually receive: the Legion of Honor—if only because it comes with an acceptance speech. There I would have a worthy forum for honoring the memory of all of those honest, talented, and underappreciated gardeners, beginning with my grandfather. He died when I was hardly out of horticulture school, and I would have loved for him to know me as a gardener. For now, may these pages stand in homage to him.

My years at horticulture school in Le Tremblay-sur-Mauldre were not the grand liberation you might expect—quite the opposite. Until then, I had been shy, anxious, and a bit slow. Away at boarding school, I was simply miserable. I didn’t pay attention in class, apart from the class of Monsieur Cazot, who forced us to learn the Latin names of plants by heart—providing a means of finally seeming intellectual when I returned home to see my much-longed-for parents on Fridays. Monday mornings were particularly difficult. All of my schoolmates told stories about their weekends’ sexual exploits—which I later learned were entirely fabricated—while, sheepishly, I carefully hung my week’s worth of shirts, their clean smell reminding me of home and my mother.

Living with three hundred other teenage boys is no easy affair—especially if you’re on the scrawny side. Although I eventually grew out of it, at seventeen I was the very essence of a runt—to the point that my homeroom teacher regularly made the easy play on words, “Baraton but not baraqué.” (Baraqué is the French equivalent of “brawny.”) How can one be expected to respect authority after an experience like that? Boarding school and my late teens are probably the part of my life that I look back on and understand the least. For some, it’s a fun, careless time of life, but for me it was nothing at all. There were the usual rites of adolescence, of course, and in that department I didn’t miss out on anything—from stealing the hall monitor’s keys and sneaking out at night to the dirty handkerchiefs we called “SM’s” for spécial masturbation, which I put with the rest of the wash, with the sniff of a feigned runny nose, in front of my mother, who believed (or mercifully pretended to believe) that I had a perpetual cold. The inventor of Kleenex has since comforted, among other things, the guilty consciences of countless teenaged boys. Those years probably had their importance, but they seem so insignificant today, so flat and banal, that they now leave me utterly indifferent.

At the end of three years of study I received, somewhat in spite of myself, two diplomas, neither of which corresponded to the then-prestigious French baccalauréat, which allows its recipients to attend universities. In those days, not having the “bac” was hardly unheard-of—in fact, it was much more common to not have one. My youth was riddled with humiliations, but a missing diploma is not one of them. French celebrities who go on about their difficult childhoods and put on acts to confess that they never got their bacs make me smile on the rare occasion they don’t simply annoy me. Back then, it was still possible to get an education and be promoted to a job in public service without the bac—with a bit of hard work, one could still build a career. Today, the same students have to make it through a gauntlet of special institutions with pretentious names and obtain equally grandiose-sounding diplomas before they can start showing what they are capable of. What the system lacks in developing modesty it compensates with by developing patience. The career that I started at the end of the 1970s would now be out of reach for somebody with the profile I had at the time. To become a chef de travaux d’art—or to put it more simply, to have my job—one now has to have degrees from a system of prestigious schools that I can’t be bothered to understand.

During the summer of 1976, the weather was beautiful and extraordinarily hot. I was hungry for freedom and independence—in other words, a motor scooter that would allow me to get away from the house. I had to find work. Versailles was the regional capital and known for its gardens, and it sat proudly just down the hill from Celle-Saint-Cloud (my motorized bike was in its death throes). Gide wrote that one should always follow their path, as long as it keeps climbing upwards, but I challenge you to climb anything with a broken vélomoteur! Coasting down the slope, I arrived happy and proud on the Grande Esplanade, one of the broad avenues that lead to the palace. I was as stirred up as if I had just discovered America. It was the first day of my adult life—heady and delicious.

What mysterious force led me to the director’s office? A more conceited person might say it was destiny, but I remember asking for directions from a guard who responded in a Corsican accent so thick that I understood nothing. I wandered aimlessly for the next forty-five minutes, sweating and anxious, through the château’s labyrinth of corridors before coming across a door that seemed larger and more ornate than the others. More importantly, it was open.

The room was bathed in light, yet cool in spite of the summer heat. It bore all of the outward signs of pomp and importance—from the old masters hanging on the walls to the shelves of rare books and armchairs as deep as tombs, to the gilded moldings and massive chandelier. I hardly noticed any of it, petrified by the gaze of the man seated across from me. With his sweep of silver hair, steely gaze, gold cane, and signet ring, Gérald Van der Kemp was so lordly that it felt only natural when he addressed me as “young man,” so stone-faced that he was often portrayed as a sculpture. His name alone was intimidating: Van der Kamp, known to others as VDK.

I didn’t know it then, but he was a world-renowned art expert. He arrived at Versailles after the Second World War and had worked with many great men—de Gaulle, Malraux, Rockefeller—putting a shine unmatched since the Revolution on a château that had been in decline when he found it. Anybody who knows something about the history of Versailles knows that Van der Kamp was responsible for restoring the Queen’s Grand Apartment as well as bringing back important pieces of furniture that had been scattered throughout various French ministries, including the King’s Desk, a masterpiece of eighteenth-century craftsmanship. Restoring the château to its former splendor might seem like an obvious goal today, but it was the labor of Van der Kamp’s entire life. Reweaving the silk brocades that cover the walls of the royal bedrooms took twenty-five years for the Queen’s Bedroom and thirty for the King’s Bedroom. The patterns were so complex and the materials so precious that the silk-weavers of Lyon could only produce three centimeters of fabric a day. Van der Kamp had to continually seek funding and fight for Versailles—the idea of cultural heritage and, more importantly, the need for integrity, was just emerging.

But I knew nothing of all this when I arrived in his office. I felt ridiculous and weak, blushing when he asked me what I wanted. Quivering, I stammered who I was. Van der Kamp rose from his chair and took me to see the head of the guards who was looking for seasonal workers.

He led me down to the grand statue-lined staircase under the astonished gaze of one of his underlings—normally nobody could just walk into Van der Kamp’s office as I had done—callers had to pass through several circles of belligerent secretaries and inquisitive guards. I still wonder how I was able to slip past the surveillance of so much personnel! For once, I had been lucky. At any rate, it was nothing I had planned.

I walked across the empty courtyard under the crushing heat—the height of summer had dried up the grass as well as the tourists—and entered a dark and dirty office with low ceilings. The complete antithesis of the place I had just left, it was a dusty hole that needed airing out. Nothing decorated its graying walls apart from an impressive number of empty bottles and a motley gallery of objects unified by their common filth and uselessness. This is the first time I realized that the Versailles of the gardens is truly the opposite of the Versailles of the château. I then had the honor of meeting the inimitable, unerring, and irreplaceable Monsieur Chock. In those days, the directors were military men and the magnificent Monsieur Chock prided himself on being an adjudant-chef. As round and jolly as VDK was lean and distant, he immediately made me feel comfortable. I had trouble keeping myself from laughing when he donned a kepi that was visibly three sizes too small for his huge, bulging head, before struggling into a uniform jacket that was far too small for his broad shoulders and prominent belly. Between this little man with his hat like a cigarette butt and the stately Van der Kamp, I had truly encountered two different sides of France.

Chock hired me as a ticket seller and took me to the place that would, starting the following morning, become my place of work. We were quite the couple, him on a motor scooter that threatened to collapse under his rotund silhouette, and me following behind, pedaling like mad on my VéloSolex, which, caught up by the excitement of it all, had refused to start. We were so unimpressive that the few tourists who had braved the heat barely stood aside to let us pass. Chock nearly ran down a group from Japan, shouting, “Place, place!” before roundly cursing them.

Tourism was different in those days. There were simply far fewer foreign visitors, because visas and plane tickets were quite expensive. Their rarity made foreigners seem more rich and exotic. They were quite a contrast to the average French visitors to the park—small families who had come to picnic on the lawns with transistor radios and some sandwiches.

We finally made it to the abominable huts where I would work for an entire summer. Probably guard posts recuperated from some embassy and hastily repainted green to cover the original colors of the French flag, the rotting wooden ticket stands stood at the entrance to the park and served as a sort of tollbooth for the cars that were still allowed to drive around the grounds. How could they have tolerated something so ugly at the palace gates? I understand when I think how much the new, far more attractive stands that were installed a few years ago cost. Much has changed at Versailles. If the park seems better maintained than it used to be, it’s above all else because the budget for maintenance has nearly doubled in less than fifteen years.

Those who worked the ticket stands were a motley crew. There was a Spaniard, a notorious alcoholic, who insulted visitors who didn’t have exact change. He arrived every morning with his parrot’s cage strapped to the back of his motor scooter—he and his bird never parted company. His religious devotion to his pet was a sign of the gentle nature that lay (as is so often the case) beneath his rough exterior. The parrot squawked all day, and his booth reeked of bird droppings and cheap wine. Then there was the colleague whose uniform was always impeccable. In spite of his dignified, military air, he turned out to be a smalltime crook. Probably due to his intransigent appearance, he had been trusted with the task of distributing tickets to the cars as they arrived. One day, he dropped his book of ticket stubs, and when I stooped to pick it up, I noticed that the numbers on the tickets weren’t consecutive. Standing ramrod straight, he explained in a clipped accent that he liked for everything to be tidy. He ironed the tickets when he ironed his shirts. Freshly pressed, the old tickets were “like new” and the profits could easily be slipped into the starched pockets of his jacket. He added, teasing, that my own uniform was rarely presentable. Stunned, I realized that I was honest after all. There was also a retired agent from the riot police, who liked to keep the parrot company and reminisce about his lost authority. And there was the drunk. He always scared me with his pale, watery eyes and bright red face. I couldn’t tell you what his voice sounded like—I rarely heard him speak, apart from cursing his wife under his breath. His other half was a matron as thoroughly gin soaked as he—he beat her, but not, I think, without her putting up a considerable fight. Some people even said that he sold her body for drink, but it was hard to imagine who would have wanted her. I was still young, but they soon swept away any remaining illusions I might have had about romance—they were sordid, comic, and sad. The drunkard’s wife represented, for me, the very image of degradation. Had she once been beautiful? She was so wracked by the effects of drink that one could no longer even guess. I’m no partisan of prohibition; to the contrary, I even planted vineyards at Versailles. But alcoholism, a common problem among gardeners, horrifies me. They were a couple straight out of Zola, and I don’t much like Zola. (Not that I have a particularly developed literary sense, but I find his style heavy.) Perhaps I’ve always had a taste for regularity and logic. Is it the taste of Versailles?

The drunk didn’t last the summer. One morning his car was found in the Grand Canal—inebriated as usual, he had driven right into the water. My coworkers joked about it, saying that he had never had much use for water, but some of them were sad, and I think we also felt a twinge of guilt. I was personally appalled by the whole grotesque story. The thing that got to me was not that he had died a fool but that he had died so foolishly. Every year, a group on the Internet attributes the Darwin Awards to the stupidest deaths, and one of my greatest fears is to be a recipient. Upon returning to France from a recent trip to China, a violent storm greeted our arrival. The sky was full of lightning and the plane shook so hard it seemed it might fall apart. I had the great luck to fly first class, and as a consequence, I had received a pair of comfortable white bedroom slippers that were supposed to help make the eleven-hour flight more tolerable. Just as the plane was going into its landing pattern, I put my shoes back on. My neighbor, visibly an experienced flyer with the confident air of a man who knows what he’s talking about, told me that, given the weather, we wouldn’t be on the ground for another half hour. I was tempted to retort that if we were going to crash at the end of the runway, I didn’t want my cadaver to appear in slippers in the pages of Paris Match. The faces of the dead are traditionally embalmed wearing a false, triumphant smile. I have no problem with artifice—it is one of the principal tools of my trade—it’s the smile that gets me. Without going overboard in the department of dying wishes, my only request would be that I keep my dignity.

My arrival at Versailles was almost forty years ago, but it was a very different France then, or at least, a different Versailles. We were still in the postwar world. Most of my coworkers had been hired after the war and were finishing their careers (people tend to stay on in Versailles, a stability that seems archaic today). Versailles is already a provincial place and a town with a certain nostalgia for the past. It was natural for it to be out of sync not only with Paris, but with the rest of contemporary life. Hints of another time still survive at Versailles. When I see our polite, civilized personnel and consider the huge number of regulations and other recommendations that they are expected to uphold and respect, I remember with astonishment and a bit of sentimentality the Versailles of my youth. It was like something out of a film by Tati: cars driving in whatever direction they liked; people honking their horns; and to keep the order, two armed policemen on motorcycles, who drove on the lawns and raced each other down the allées in the evenings. One of them was Indian and only took off his turban to put on his helmet. He liked to use his revolver and had taken to firing shots in the air to enforce the “keep off the grass” signs. At some point he must have been told that even firing into the air could be dangerous and that it was better to use his whistle. Thereafter, he would begin by giving a short tweet on his whistle, leaving enough time for the rest of us to come running and watch our favorite motor cop clearing the lawns in the style he preferred, with triumphant joy. These days the administration is far more serious: there are no more police officers on motorcycles and nobody carries a firearm.

The other personnel were no less colorful. I remember a certain Monsieur Alexandre, a gardener by trade, but physically, a Hercules. He was so strong that he could lift by himself the cash registers it took two or three of us to move. A man of few words, it was clear that he was not to be dallied with. One day, when he was nearly sixty, a visitor to the park pushed his luck. A child was playing with a ball, and, inspired by the reliable instinct of error, kicked it directly into the giant’s shin. Hercules would have remained calm if the father, the very personification of the entitled native of Versailles, hadn’t come and demanded an explanation, and worse, an apology. The conversation became heated. On the verge of exploding, the father launched into a speech: “My fellow, if you weren’t an old man, I’d have half a mind to slap you …” He received a right hook that, much to the delight of his son, laid him flat on the ground.

In the isolated, fantastic world of Versailles, I felt like a king. It was the sort of triumphant summer where the heat is as relentless as one’s confidence. The Bee Gees had just crossed the Atlantic and were singing “Holiday”; Alain Delon and Jean-Paul Belmondo were the epitome of a society that thought it was free. I too had the impression I was finally tasting that independence. A careless feeling was in the air—all punishments seemed like they might be abolished, even the death penalty. The only terrorists anybody was worrying about were Breton separatists. A bomb went off in the south wing of the palace, destroying three halls in the Galerie du Consulat, which had been inaugurated by the president only two weeks earlier. Nobody died, only one guard was injured, and yet, in those days when there was so little terrorism, people spoke of a “vision of war” and an “outrage.” The media referred to the guilty parties as “carrion” and President Giscard d’Estaing made them disappear after the “attack” on Versailles as though he had only to brush them away.

By then I was riding down the hill and back up again without any problem, proud of the new Peugeot 103 moped that had finally liberated me from my mother’s VéloSolex. Every evening, I drove up the hill to Celle-Saint-Cloud with the bags of money from the cash registers. This was also the sign of another age—today, armored cars take the receipts from the registers and place them in a strongbox every evening. In 1976, I carried it down the country roads of the Yvelines; the louder the change jingled, the happier I felt. Sometimes I would stop at the Parly II shopping center to buy magazines and would take out a bundle of bills to impress the salesgirl. That summer, believe me, I felt as happy as a king.

I only worked at the cash registers for three months. Choron, the head gardener, regularly came to supervise. No detail of the park’s administration escaped Choron’s notice. If a problem occurred, he was there within five minutes—the source of his one of his nicknames, “Zorro.” The other, “Nœu-nœil” referred to his glass eye. A glass eye is rarely pleasing to behold, but when it’s poorly made, it becomes downright ridiculous. Choron was extremely kind and always put on the jovial air of a true Frenchman, down to the beret, but his entire being exuded sorrow. Injured during the war, he had never been able to have children—part of the reason, I think, that he took such a liking to me. The gardens were his entire life—two years after retiring, he hung himself. There grew between us a sort of silent understanding that made me truly happy to see him. In the course of one of our brief conversations (they rarely lasted longer than five minutes), Choron learned that I had been to horticultural school. A few days later, he offered me a job as a gardener at Versailles, starting in September. To tell the truth, I wasn’t thrilled at the idea. I didn’t like myself very much; I hardly had an existence of my own and was part of a generation that felt little enthusiasm for the future in general (the “bof generation”). That may even be how I responded to Choron’s offer: with an unenthusiastic “bof” … Then he dangled the possibility of my own housing in the park and my face lit up. I would finally be able to escape my parents’ authority and the constant attempts to hide my late-night returns home. I accepted his offer and my life truly began.