When I was a child, I used to hear rustling from time to time: the silent sound of craftsmen cutting, bending and filing their piece of the world’s hill. Yes, my great-uncle was a cabinet-maker. A young man who leaned upright against the trunk of an oak tree, wiping the sweat from his forehead with his hand as he caressed the marquetry. He watched his work in progress, always asking himself the question: could my hand have been even more perfect?

The golden leaves that his brush trimmed into twigs in the dark light of his studio, sometimes folding back under the sun as he worked. His hand, twitching under the gouge, cuts throbbing sections of shavings that pile up in an almost divine regularity, parting like flesh that splits and palpitates; he slices under the iron in tortured sections.

I love these skilled trades, and that’s why some exceptional men and women launched the  association “VALEURS d’EXCELLENCE” on 6th November: Alain CARADEUC, president of the association, and Pierre BALLET, vice-president, accompanied by Chrystel DECRÉ DEPATY, Olivier BOILEAU DESCAMPS and Jean-Christophe MARTINENQ. Here, then, are the essential partners of luxury, who are often insufficiently recognised and sometimes even ignored. Preserving them and passing them on seems to go without saying, but it’s nothing of the sort, says the Chairman.