MANSION FOR SEVENPENCE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 17 August 1938, Page 7

MANSION FOR SEVENPENCE

ANCIENT DWELLING WITHOUT . AN. OWNER. You can buy a mansion of three storeys high, with a wide oak door main entrance, reached by three steps. A dozen windows overlook the street, and a broad staircase leads from the lower to the upper' apartments. This mansion, built in the sixteenth century, stands in a picturesque street of Sarlat, in the department of Dordogne, and is yours for five francs, roughly sevenpence. The building belongs to no one. For centuries it was used by a brotherhood of monks, who abandoned it, and there it has stood ever since, a fine, solid old building. This ownerless ancient dwelling stands in a street of buildings as handsome and ancient as itself, in a quarter of the town which has hardly changed since the end of the Middle Ages, and if you buy this house,' when you open the latticed windows you will be able to look down on quaint winding streets, on other mansions with ponderous doors, rounded turrets, grated windows, and loop-holes convenient for aiming with crossbow or musket at an unwelcome visitor. On a wall near by you will be able to see a Phrygian bonnet, carved in the stone by some patriot San-culotte of the Revolution. In your town, too, you will find traces of Englishmen who preceded you long ago, for a leopard carved on a house front is the leopard of the arms of England of the time of the Hundred Years War and marks where some English captain lodged. A poet, La Boetie, was born in the town of Sarlat, and its houses bear many traces of sieges and old wars forgot. If you would like to buy the ancient mansion at Sarlat for five francs the Municipal authorities.will sell it to you for that price, but you must be prepared to put it in repair.