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out to the realtor – the warped roof, the grotty wallpaper, not to mention the need to rewire the entire house. The money we had to put as a deposit on the house was finite. Neither Franck nor I had a job or really any prospects of one.
    Franck, on the other hand, had no problem believing in only the good omens and discarding the bad. He had already moved us to Marey in his mind.
    “We could do a B&B, or a chambres-d’hôtes !” he said, handing me a freshly soaked vinegar cloth. “I’ll set up that little room for you in the grange and you can write fabulous articles and pourquoi pas a novel?”
    I longed to be swept away with Franck and his plans but my burning foot tethered me to the ground.
    “What if the property is so cheap because it’s defective?”
    The idea had obviously not occurred to him. “Defective?  How could that be?”
    “I don’t know. I’ve never bought a house before. Terrible neighbours could be another possibility.”
    “The neighbour is Victor’s brother. I grew up with him. He and his wife are charmants . They make honey for a living.”
    I thought for a few seconds more. “What if there are Roman ruins under the ground?”
    Franck went pale at this, as I suspected he would. When Franck was just a small boy his grandfather had found some Roman coins while tilling his vineyards. He gave them to Franck on the condition that Franck was sworn to secrecy. Finding Roman artefacts or ruins was a real problem in Burgundy. If word got out, the government and the archaeologists would get involved and the upshot would be the expropriation of land - a thing to be avoided at all costs.
    “I know my dad always has properties inspected before offering to purchase anything,” I said to Franck who was still drawing his brows together over the Roman ruins scenario. “Do you think we could do that?”
    “Maybe,” Franck conceded. “But I have no idea how to go about it.” His family didn’t know any more than we did. Franck’s parents had inherited their house from Michèle’s father, who had inherited it from his mother, who had inherited it from her family and so on and so forth back through the centuries. Like many villagers, they had never bought or sold a house in their lives.
     
     

     
     
    We spent the next few hours searching for property inspection companies in the pages jaunes only to find that like so many surprising things (peanut butter and money orders and until recently, dental floss), they simply did not seem to exist in France.
    “How can that be?” I limped around the garden, the pea gravel crunching under my flip flops. “There must be somebody that people can turn to here to check out a place – someone they can trust.”
    Franck snapped his fingers. “ Notaires !”
    “What?”
    “Of course there aren’t any property inspectors here. Everyone would just ask their notary to do it.”
    I flopped down on the step beside Franck. “You’re right. That has to be it.”
    Notaires were as essential to life in rural France as country doctors like Le Père Dupont. Families seemed to inherit one from their ancestors and the family notaire basically possessed a huge file (or files) of paperwork pertaining to their lives: birth certificates, marriage certificates, the buying and selling of vineyards and houses and more. The files of some Burgundian families spanned back to the 1600s.
    My first and only exposure to Franck’s family notary – the incompetent Maître Lefebvre – was not felicitous. He was a notorious drinker who cared far more for a good Gevrey-Chambertin than doing legal work. The previous summer he had forgotten to get us to fill out several essential forms prior to our wedding. The secretary from Villers-la-Faye’s mayor’s office called us a week after the ceremony to inform us that, despite the copious amounts of wine and champagne that had been consumed as well as that epic croquembouche that had been gobbled up, as far as the French government was