He even signs SMS messages: "Molecatcher to the king." It's been over two centuries since Louis XVI was guillotined on Paris' Place de la Concorde, but the job of hunting the underground pest that so troubled French monarchs on the grounds of the Versailles palace still exists.

Its current holder carries on, business as usual, with a task that hasn't changed in centuries.

"It might sound funny, but it's serious work. My job is to make sure molehills don't deface Europe's finest gardens," says 36-year-old Jerome Dormion, the latest in an unbroken 330-year line of mole-killers in the royal palace and gardens visited by six million people a year. "We still have visiting dignitaries too. Imagine if they were to see them!"

Dormion - who started out as a regular gardener before noticing a niche in the molecatching market - keeps the roughly 800 hectares (2,000 acres) of magnificent horticulture mole-free. The grounds include fountains, an orangery, glistening landscaped grass, Marie Antoinette's cherished farm and famed gardener Andre Le Notre's Royal Path and Grand Canal.

He takes the work very seriously - but there's the odd flash of humor.

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But when I flashed my boobs, I kept the back of my shirt down. I did not raise it up entirely, not even when I was zombie-eyed and slipping off bar stools, because to do so would have been to reveal the part of myself that was seriously hidden, raw and vulnerable. It would have been to show you the moles on my back.

I was 7, maybe 8, when I discovered my back did not look like other people’s. Nothing dramatic: Black buckshot on a white canvas. But those things were like hideous scars to me.

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