He excited the modern beds around the building and between it and the fence bordering the road in Menton, on the elegant harmony, by the rules to which they were subjected majestic trees and plants. He understood well the gardens, like all things in life: great order, respect for hierarchy, each in its place, without ambition to produce confusion. But he feared exposing their tastes “stale man”, remembering the taunts of the prince and Castro. They preferred the park, which the Colonel himself called in the “wild garden”.

They had taken advantage of the existing dilapidated olive trees on the headland as the basis for this park. There were trees that could not be called old, shabby and inadequate to highlight this name, were simply old age without visible, with an air of unchanging eternity contemporaries that made the rocks and waves. Trees were more than ruins, black wood walls deformed and collapsed in a storm, lots of curved wood and hollowed by the scorching of fire extinguished. Here too it was more important than the invisible exposed to the light. Its roots, thick as tree trunks, winding disappeared in the red earth to re-emerge thirty or forty yards away. Had died on one side and vigorously resuscitated on the other. What was five hundred years before now appeared as a tree stump as a table black, cut by the ax or the beam, and the root, at ground, flourished in his turn, became a tree, to continue a life without limits visible, in that centuries were counted as years. Others had the heart eaten olives, drained, held just half of its shell of bark, starting as a tower by an explosion, but high in vegetable hair sported their unlikely, a few handfuls of silvery leaves along the branches winding Black. At his feet, the wood of the roots, which seemed to hold the knots in the first sap of the planet, covering a radius much larger than that occupied by the branches in space. Some olive trees that only three or four hundred years had stood with the arrogance of youth, lush, lush, tending his shadow on the ground lightly, restless, almost diaphanous, a powdered glass shade that site changed at the whim of the wind.