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During the rest of that summer, we scoured the valleys of the Dordogne and the Lot, eventually inspecting forty houses. I was the one who kept saying no. Michael stalked each house the way a lion stalks a zebra. If it could be had, he wanted it, no matter its condition. As far as he was concerned, the more typique the better. Typique means typical, but applied to regional houses, it means true to the local style. To be typique is to have authenticity; it does not ensure that the house will have the essentials. For instance, one of his favorite finds had no roof. Another lacked a floor (you just walked on the beams, peering warily at the story below). Most lacked heat but for a fireplace. One had no electricity, another no potable water. One had water but no plumbing. One, a converted chapel, lacked windows. Sometimes a ceiling , sometimes a wall, was missing. Michael kept rea2 T H E F A L L O F A H U N D R E D S T A R S soning that we were shopping the low end of the market and should expect a few defects. I wanted walls and a roof. Many of the homes we saw remain a blur. There were a few memorable exceptions: a cottage so deep in the woods that no road could reach it, shown to us by a dapper agent with slicked-back hair who reeked of cologne; a little house by the side of the road that had been converted to a Buddhist shrine by Vietnamese monks, shown by a nervous agent who wore house slippers and a business suit; an old half-restored manse with no water supply and a pig farmer for a neighbor, shown by a chirpy British woman, the only female agent we encountered. The whole of that summer, the quality of our days was determined by the real-estate agents into whose hands we entrusted our search. The clever ones got the sense of our taste after one showing and then led us to properties of ever-increasing interest, so that we ended the day with serious prospects to discuss over dinner. The dimmer ones dragged us from one dismal dwelling to the next, leaving us with the sense of a day wasted. A few of these agents were exasperating. We met the strangest one of all through an inadvertent introduction by the landlord whose house we were renting in Temniac , a quiet suburb of Sarlat that once served as the palatial residence of Sarlat’s bishops. Our landlord, Yves Bouter, was a gruff bear of a man who drove a huge machine for tearing up streets—the mechanical monster was parked in front of the house. Excavation was his business, politics his meat. Bouter was aggressively proud of his membership in the Communist Party, and we could hardly get a word in edge3 0 h o u s e h u n t i n g wise to finalize our rental agreement as he rattled on about his battles on behalf of progress and against the witless blockers of development. For an avowed communist , though, Bouter maintained an odd assortment of opinions. He was all for private property—he was, in fact, a private contractor, proud of his house, land, and digging machine—but he railed against the value-added tax (as every Frenchman does regardless of political party). He enjoyed being called a communist mostly for the label’s revolutionary cachet. The subject that really riled Bouter was religion—he was an atheist—and his nemesis in this debate was a hated next-door neighbor, a lunatic (according to Bouter) named Vidal (he spat out his name). It was only when we mentioned that we were thinking of buying a house that Bouter warned us about Vidal, a part-time real-estate agent who presided over an archaic religious cult whose members dunked themselves in so-called holy springs and mumbled strange incantations in the woods. “Méfiez-vous!” Watch out for him, Bouter insisted, his face coloring with pique. Well, this was news. A real-estate agent next door? Could we resist? We waited a day before approaching the neighbor (and made sure that when we did, Bouter was not in sight). There was no sign in front of M. Vidal’s house to indicate that he was an agent immobilier , but next to the doorbell was a little card announcing that...

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