Benoît Bartherotte is the owner of perhaps the most beautiful house in the world—a broad, caramel-wood cabin at the very tip of the peninsula of Cap Ferret, shaded on all sides by wide verandas and balconies, and sheltered from the gentle sea-spray by fig trees, palms, and towering stone pines. But he won’t be spending much time in it this weekend.
Instead, Bartherotte—a former fashion designer turned self-appointed guardian of France’s most coveted spit of land—is busy constructing a vast trench, a firebreak some 200 feet wide, using a trio of heavy-duty forklifts. “We’ve been working nonstop since the machines arrived at noon to protect the Pointe,” he told a local news channel on Saturday. “They’re our machines, and our men.”
