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As we drove into Sarlat on a hot July afternoon, buying a house was not on the agenda. We were simply looking for a place to spend the night. Sarlat is the gem of Périgord, a golden maze of medieval streets and alleyways , but it was not designed for modern traffic. In 1837, to ease congestion, the city fathers decided to cut a thoroughfare—they called it a traverse—through the center of town, splitting the city into two gnarled hemispheres . As a result, the street map of Sarlat looks like an open walnut shell. On one side of the traverse, now called la rue de la République, there are steep, twisting lanes with old limestone houses, adorned with hanging flower pots. On the other side lie the town’s more public spaces: Saint Sacerdos Cathedral, with its strange onion-shaped belfry, the old cemetery and its mysterious tower known as the Lantern of the Dead, the stately 1 a c h a n g e o f p l a n s Hôtel de Ville, and a cluster of Renaissance manoirs, with Gothic bays and mullioned windows. There are pruned public gardens and a broad cobblestone square, where a bustling open-air market is held on Saturdays. On either side of la rue de la République, the ambercolored buildings of the city gleam with pride. But these delights are invisible from the trafficclogged traverse. Cramped shops and cafés with cheap plastic chairs line both sides of the street. There isn’t a leaf of shade, and in summer cars and trucks spouting diesel exhaust nudge along, baking in the heat. If your first introduction to Sarlat is a traffic jam on la rue de la République, you’ll wonder why the Guide Michelin devotes five pages to the town. Yet that is just how we saw Sarlat on a scorching summer’s day in 1984, and looking back on it, that is where our story begins. We were nearing the end of a rambling automobile tour that began in Paris, led us south through the flat Loire Valley and the mountainous Auvergne, and in the last week had brought us to the rolling hills of the Dordogne . We had several days left to the trip before we were due in Nice to catch our returning charter flight to the States. The route was circuitous, but Michael had driven through the Dordogne years before and wanted me to see a little of the countryside before we linked up again with the autoroute to the Côte d’Azur. A travel writer once observed that the Dordogne, with its picturesque byways and narrow country roads, is preeminently a land for dawdlers, but even on that blistering day, speeding through on our way to make a plane connection , with the car windows rolled down and the scenery going by in a warm blur, we caught its allure. What I remember are rows of poplars along a river bank 4 h o u s e h u n t i n g leaning in the breeze, their feathery V-shaped branches like quills casting lean reflections in the water as we rounded a bend; newly mown hay rolled up like yellow carpets, with nearby farm buildings nestling companionably together like a litter of kittens; a ruined manor with pepper pot towers deserted in a meadow; sunlight gleaming on a village at the crest of a hill, its houses stacked almost on top of one another; shady passages through forests alternating with hot stretches of open road and the smell of tar; a sharp blue, cloudless sky. Even the meanest farmhouse looked inviting, thanks to the cheerful cast of the local stone, which seemed so different from the gloomy gray of the row houses farther north. In the Dordogne the houses are built with limestone , often in uneven blocks that soften edges and give the rural buildings an affable air of nonchalance. Depending on the hour, the color of the stone can take on a variety of hues, from pinkish gold in the morning to blazing white in the afternoon, to yellow, amber, ocher, and dark rust as the sun goes down. I remember thinking to myself as we drove along that these must be the loveliest houses in the world. For lunch we had stopped in Brantôme, a lazy old town at the fork of two branches of the river Dronne, the site of a massive...

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