Our builders had left an assortment of rubble and cracked flagstones, old light switches and chewed wiring, beer bottles and broken tiles beside the swimming pool as souvenirs of their work on the house.
It was understood that one day Didier and Claude would come back with an empty truck, take the debris away and we could plant the alley of rose bushes we had planned. But somehow the truck was never empty, or Claude had broken a toe, or Didier was busy knocking down some distant ruin in the Basses Alpes.
In time, the souvenir rubble began to look quite pretty, an informal rockery softened by weeds and splashed with poppies. I told my wife that it had a certain unplanned charm. She wasn't convinced. Roses, she said, were generally considered more attractive than rubble and beer bottles. I started to clear the pile. In fact, I enjoy manual labour, the rhythm of it and the satisfaction of seeing order emerge from a neglected mess.
After a couple of weeks, I reached bare earth and started swinging a pickaxe. To celebrate his brilliant wit, we are serialising his books this week. I had loosened about three yards of hard-packed earth when I saw a gleam of dirty yellow among the weed roots.
At first I thought it was a bottle cap but when I rinsed it under the hose, it shone gold in the sun. It was a Napoleon coin, a franc piece, dated Ten minutes later, I found another. Dashing to consult the financial section of Le Provencal newspaper, I discovered Napoleons were now worth francs, between 25 and 30 quid. Never has a pickaxe been taken up with more enthusiasm, and it inevitably attracted my neighbour Faustin's attention.
