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