Vous Voyez Ce Que Je Veux Dire?

This phrase is a bit of a bête noir for me, know what I mean? A couple of years ago, I had a client who had the irritating verbal tic of repeating his every point at least a half dozen times and then rounding it all off with this phrase. At first, I thought it was because I was foreign and therefore evidently thick as a plank, but after a while I realised he didn't really know he was doing it, so I became more relaxed about it.

My main issue with the phrase, though, is that I have never managed to say it without virtually swallowing my tongue in the process. Properly uttered, it should come out as an elegant whole and sound something like "V' v'yez sk'j'vuddire". I can't seem to manage successfully the transition from "sk" to "je" to "v".

I wished badly for it this week though. I returned from an appointment one morning to find hubby waving a bit of paper with a phone number on it and saying could I phone this person back because he hadn't been able to follow what she wanted. The ensuing call with a clearly elderly person proceeded along the lines of:

"Hello, this is Zoe Holt ... you wanted to talk to me"
"Yes. Are you the one with a house for sale?"
"Well yes, Madame; I am an estate agent; I have many houses for sale"
"Can you tell me where it is?"
"I need to know which house you are talking about ... do you have a reference number?"
"It's in La Souterraine"
"Yes, but do you have a reference? Or perhaps a price, to help me know which one it is?"
"I just want to know the address"
"But I don't know which house you mean"
"Oh, well, if you don't want to tell me the address ..."
"It's not that I don't want to, but I cannot tell which house you are referring to unless you can give me some more information"
"It says here it has an entrance hall, living room, kitchen, 3 bedrooms ..."
"Hmmm, but I have many houses like that: I need something to help me identify it"
"It's 176,000 euros"
"I don't think I have anything in La Souterraine for that price right now - is there a reference number?"
"The reference is xxxxx"
" Ah, that number is not one of my references. Have you perhaps got the wrong agent?"
"I just want to know where it is"
"I can't tell you where it is if I don't know what house it is. I think you may have called the wrong agent"
"It says here [repeats entire house description again] and Orpi"
"Right! [with relief] The house is for sale with Orpi agency. You are talking to Holt. The house is not one of mine. I don't know this house."
"I just want to know the address"
"It isn't for sale with me; it's for sale with Orpi. You must ring Orpi"
"Ah well, it's not for me anyway. If you won't tell me the address, I'll have to get him to ring you .... "

A few days later, I answered to phone to a much younger man:
"Hello, I'm enquring about a house you have for sale in La Souterraine"
" Very good, Monsieur ... do you have a reference?"
"I'm not sure what the reference is, but it's 176,000 euros"
"Ah ... did someone else call me about this some days ago?"
"Yes, but I want to know the address"
"I believe you have the wrong agency and this is not one of my houses. I think the house is for sale with Orpi? I am Holt Immo"
"Oh, well, OK, but can you just tell me the address ..."

A Fruitless but Fascinating Afternoon

This week, I had to make a visit to the central tax office in our nearest city, Limoges. Not to do anything mundane like paying or enquiring about taxes, but to search out the answer to a particularly odd property question.

This story started when I had an offer on a house a couple of weeks ago. Good news, except that when I started preparing the sale contract, it emerged that there was an issue with the ownership of the correct plots of land. In France, every bit of land is mapped on a cadastral plan and the entire history of each plot is theoretically available to all at the tax office. For the past few years, all the plans have also been available on-line. For the most part, it's a marvellous system and works very well, but anomalies do arise.

In this case, a very small village house with a little back garden is for some reason divided down the middle into two plots, but only one of these plots has ever been mentioned in the last three sales deeds. It is obvious from reading these old deeds, that everyone concerned in the various sales and purchases thought they were selling/buying the whole house (well, you wouldn't buy half a house, would you?), but in fact they weren't. So, I needed to investigate what was going on with the second plot, and a very interesting process it turned out to be.

The first woman I dealt with, although extremely pleasant, didn't come across as exactly fizzing with intelligence and was pretty quickly at the end of her resources, so passed me over to someone more senior. This woman was a lovely, able and funny person and we spent a pleasurable couple of hours trying to solve the mystery together. In the process, I was admitted through doors marked "NOTAIRES AND GEOMETRES ONLY" (the French love to surround themselves with regulation and then conveniently ignore most of it).

We ended up on our knees in a basement, sifting through sheaves of the original plans, hand-drawn and notated with exqusite precision. When she started talking about referring to the Napoleonic plans, attractive though that prospect was to a history buff like me, I had to admit that I didn't think it would take us any further. I think she was as disappointed as I at calling the adventure to a halt, but we had found as much as we were likely to.

I didn't really resolve my problem, though I now have a lot more information and a theory as to what has happened, but the experience was well worth a lost afternoon.