When, on March 14th 1912, Oskar Serti came for the first time to the Park Güell, he was immediately struck by the extraordinary resemblance the place had with the one that he had imagined as the setting for the moving encounter of the two heroes of his latest novel, Jeanne Berstein and François Virteuil.
From the forking paths to the blanket of autumn leaves, everything was exactly the same. The presence of this waste bin was the only thing different from the reality of his book. With amazing attention to matching them up, Serti considered it so completely out of character with the profound romanticism of the scene that he decided to remove it and place it further away.
Hardly had he grabbed the waste bin, however, than he noticed two individuals glaring at him. To camouflage his ill-intentions, he tried to pretend to be roughly throwing something into it, but the only thing he found in his pockets which he could sacrifice was a copy of his own book. Refusing to commit such a sacrilegious act, he thus felt compelled to explain the reason for his strange behaviour to these people and, to justify himself further, he read them some long excerpts from his book.
It never occurred to him that these two individuals, being greatly irritated, were not even listening to him but looking at each other like two lovers ready to accept anything, even the destruction of a waste bin, to find themselves alone at last at their meeting place.