Choose Picardy for all your warmaking needs

Picardy was named after its inhabitants, the Picards (rather than the other way round). In the thirteenth century, students in Paris who came from this area had the reputation of being troublemakers (picards) so the region these stroppy students came from was named 'Stropshire'. Over the centuries, Picardy has hosted more battles than any other French region. With easy access to England, the Netherlands and Germany, and with nice flat fields for fighting on, Picardy offers location solutions for all your belligerent needs (irony alert!)

Satisfied customers include:
Edward III: "I wouldn't start a Hundred Years' War anywhere else."
The Dukes of Burgundy: "Picardy is rightfully part of Burgundy. And so is Mallorca"

General Fernando Alvarez de Toledo: "¿Qué?"
Field-Marshall Prince Mikhail Illarionovich Golenishchev-Kutusov: "Pikardi? Da!"
and, most recently, Kaiser Wilhelm II: "Grandma Victoria would love it here, it's so flat, you know she has this place at Sandringham..." (that's enough Norfolk jokes, Ed.)

La Résidence - THE French Property People

La chanson française avec La Résidence - 7: Jacques Brel - Amsterdam

La Résidence - THE French Property People

Holiday promotions in neolithic France

 Little is known about the timeshare agents of this period, though it’s reasonable to assume that there would have been good and bad ones, as there are today. A good agent would have had no trouble finding buyers for The Great Hall of the Bulls or The Painted Gallery, though The Shaft of the Dead Man might possibly have required a harder sell. Here’s where the bad guys come in. Prospective clients would be lured to a cave-share promotion with free stone axes, and would then innocently hand over their hard-earned sabre-tooth-tiger, er, sabre-teeth, in return for a draughty, damp cave in an unfashionable part of the complex. With a dead man in it.

Some prehistoric human remains found in the caves show signs of violence and even cannibalism. This strongly suggests a Holiday Club hotel promotion which went badly wrong. Today’s hapless victims of promotional scams often find that they’ve parted with thousands of pounds for non-existent timeshares. At the promotion, they are subject to aggressive sales techniques, and then find that they are, for whatever reason, unable to obtain legal redress. Cro-Magnon man was more direct in his response. If he discovered he’d been ripped off, he simply ate the promoter.

La Résidence - THE French Property People

Lascaux cave-share

It is generally believed that the practices of timeshare, fractional, and shared ownership began in the 1960s, with the selling of apartments in Swiss ski resorts. Recent archaeological evidence, however, suggests that timeshare, and the common pitfalls associated with it, may be as old as time itself…

The Lascaux caves can be found in the Dordogne department of France, and contain beautiful and elaborate wall-paintings from the Upper Paleolithic era (about 16,000 years ago.) The Lascaux cave-system contains several chambers, including The Great Hall of the Bulls, the Lateral Passage, the Shaft of the Dead Man, the Chamber of Engravings, the Painted Gallery, and the Chamber of Felines.

This immediately suggests a condominium arrangement, whereby individual owner-occupiers were at liberty to paint bulls or cats on their walls, whilst general responsibility for access, draughts, cold running water and bats would have fallen to a housing association. It is only a short step from here to realise that these luxury apartments, set in a breathtaking location in a highly-sought-after part of France, would quickly have attracted the interest of the Paleolithic leisure industry.

La Résidence - THE French Property People

La chanson belge avec La Résidence -6: Plastic Bertrand

La Résidence - THE French Property People

Innuendo in the Pas-de-Calais

The entire Nord Pas-de-Calais region is now mercifully free from innuendo. Composer Alexandre Guilmant (1837-1911) was born in Boulogne-sur-Mer and died of exhaustion after years of playing on his organ. Also born in Boulogne were the actor Benoît-Constant Coquelin (1841-1909) who was famous for his outstanding Hamlet, and engineer Frédéric Sauvage (1786-1857) inventor of the first propellor, which had an enormous shaft. The city of Douai, meanwhile was the birthplace both of sculptor Jean Boulogne (1529-1608) who was very skilled with his tool, and also of politician Charles Alexandre de Calonne (1734-1802) who once stood as an independent but lost his deposit.
Honi soit qui mal y pense.

La Résidence - THE French Property People

Honi soit qui mal y pense

The French don't have a word for double-entendre. Well, they do, sort of, but it's not double-entendre. Several years after the business with the Burghers of Calais, Edward threw a ball in Calais. The extremely attractive Joan of Kent was there, and during a particularly energetic Pavane, her garter slipped down to her ankle. After a few moments of shocked silence, several guests began to giggle in a distinctly smutty way. Gallant Edward stepped forward, slipped the garter back up Joan's leg and said "Honi soit qui mal y pense" (roughly, "You lot have got dirty minds"). After the ball, Joan asked Edward for a double-entendre, so he gave her one.

La Résidence - THE French Property People

La chanson française avec La Résidence -5: Leo Ferré

La Résidence - THE French Property People

Booze cruise

Every year, hundreds of thousands of devout English make a spiritual pilgrimage to Calais. They usually return on the same day, with much fuller cars. The first, and greatest booze cruise, which lasted 116 years, was made in 1346 by Edward III (see our Lorraine blog). It took Edward eleven months to get into Calais (it's much quicker now) and when he finally did get in, he was in a really bad mood. Edward's first inclination was to massacre all the inhabitants, but after some deep-breathing exercises he'd learnt on his anger-management course, he decided to kill just six prominent citizens. The six Burghers of Calais bravely stepped forward, nooses round their necks (you can see Rodin's sculpture of them in the main square.) Fortunately for the Burghers, Good Queen Philippa persuaded hubby Ed to be lenient, and suggested they both just do a bit of shopping and find somewhere nice to eat instead.

La Résidence - THE French Property People

Brush up your Picard

Nord Pas-de-Calais is considered by many to be the second-least-poetically-named French region (see our Centre blog). The locals want to call it "Hauts-de-l'Artois", which is a bit like saying The Heights of Norfolk.

If you go there, and if you haven't already alienated the entire population with cheap jokes about Norfolk, you could impress them instead with your stylish and idiomatic command of the Picard dialect. "Un n'incrach' pon chés pourcjiaux à l'iau claire " means "Round here, we don't fatten pigs with tap water." This will lend you an air of mystery. Or get you locked up. If things look like heading in the getting-locked-up direction, you can usually save the situation with "Armettez nous ches verr' comm' y' z'étott !" (Landlord, another round!)

La Résidence - THE French Property People

La chanson française avec La Résidence -4: Georges Brassens

La Résidence - THE French Property People

Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec Monfa

Artist Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec Monfa wasn't equal either. He was born in Albi, into an aristocratic family which claimed lineage from Chorso, Beggo and Odo (see Monday 26th September blog.) After 1000 years of strict in-breeding, the Toulouse-Lautrec Monfa gene pool was in pretty bad shape. Poor Henri had weak bones and, when he broke his legs as a teenager, they never grew again. Undeterred, Henri threw himself into the bohemian life of Montmartre (see our Ile de France blog) where, in a brief 20-year career, he created 737 canvases, 275 watercolours, 363 posters and 5,084 drawings.

Henri is credited also with the invention of Tremblement de Terre (Earthquake) a light, refreshing apéritif of half Cognac and half Absinthe (see our Provence blog). Henri's last words (possibly referring to his doctor) were "Le vieux con!" Way to go, Henri.

La Résidence - THE French Property People

Montauban's revolutionaries!

A certain amount of defacing went on in the 1968 Paris student riots. Daniel Cohn-Bendit (born in Montauban) became the students' leader and spokesperson by advocating anarchy and sexual freedom. Visit any Hall of Residence today and you'll agree, he probably achieved those things. Cohn-Bendit's first revolutionary act was to interrupt a government minister (who was opening a swimming-pool) to demand free access to the girls' dormitory. He is now a respected MEP. David Cameron take note.

Less fortunate, politically, was playwright and journalist Olympe de Gouges (also of Montauban,) who advocated equal rights for women, but made the mistake of doing so during the French Revolution. The climate of Liberté, égalité, fraternité might have seemed favourable for her feminist ideas, but instead, she was sent to the guillotine. Some revolutionaries are more equal than others.


La Résidence - THE French Property People