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If you placed yourself under anyone’s star in those days, it was the Postman Cheval,
who was able to build the castel of his dreams by assembling the little pebbles he went
to collect every day with his wheelbarrow, to which he would later render homage in one
of the finest quatrains in the French language (it’s the wheelbarrow talking):

« Je suis la fidèle compagne
du travailleur intelligent
qui chaque jour dans la campagne
cherchait son petit contingent »

« I am the faithful companion
of that clever working man
who each day without abandon
collects his quota from the land

For these images you collected from the four corners of the earth were just like stones,
each without much worth, but whose accumulation represented a kind of dream castel,
a world different from this one, better no doubt, but drawn directly from the one we
know. Exactly what Nicolas Bouvier was trying to say when he entitled his book
The Use of the World.