Not so long ago, I drove by and climbed onto the hood of my car to look over the wall. The necropolis has been planted over. But if you were to fly over the garden at low altitude, you would notice immediately that the plants there are abnormally green; the sort of green that indicates soil bloated with phosphates.

I must have been fifteen, the last time I saw the .357 Magnum in action.

In addition to being located alongside the road of death, The Estate was bordered on the other side by the Presidential hunting grounds, from which it was separated by a mere wire mesh fence. Whenever France sent its Ministers and their guests on an excursion to kill some innocent animals in an attempt to assert its identity as a big-swinging-dick of a country, said innocent animals used to run to our place for cover at the first sound of a shot fired. So the garden would be strewn with fifty or so pheasants and partridges; fat, over-nourished birds taunting the hunters from our green lawn. The beaters would do their best to recover them, but every time they tried to gain access, they were always met with the same flat-out rejection from my father.

But one Sunday, on the occasion of a visit by an African potentate, the situation turned to tragedy.

In order to entertain French Africa, a military truck filled with hapless deer had been brought from Chambord so they could be released into the forest. One of them had given the hunters the slip and had leaped over the wire fence to seek refuge under our sun porch. This time, the beaters didn’t ring on the door politely but invaded The Estate, cutting through the wire. The potentate and his courtiers followed, all done up like the subjects in that 19th-century painting King Maximilian II of Bavaria Returning from the Hunt, their hats adorned with a pheasant’s plume.

My father rushed out like a Fury, brandishing his Magnum — but realizing he couldn’t get away with shooting anybody, he took aim at the head of the deer, which exploded as he shot it at point-blank range, splattering the Black king’s pretty tweed outfit with blood.

French Africa departed The Estate very disgruntled; my father had ruined his day.

I knew how to use the Magnum. My father, good colonial that he was, had taught me at the same age he himself had learned, that’s to say, at the age of ten. I still remembered the recoil ripping into my shoulder as he made me shoot, over and over, until I could absorb the shock with my body. So when my parents went out to a restaurant, they could leave me alone between the motorway and the forest with the revolver on my bedside table and not waste a moment worrying whether or not I might be scared — after all, what babysitter could be as good as a .357 Magnum?