Where every day, without fail, having walked his 20 miles round, he set to work. In his own words "I was the first to agree with those who called me insane; I was not a builder, I had never handle a mason's trowel; I was not a sculptor. The chisel was unknown to me; not to mention architecture, it was a field in which I remained totally ignorant". He spent twenty years building what were to become the outer walls of Le Palais Ideale.