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.