Our Street
I don’t know how old our building is, but, whatever its age, I doubt it has any historic significance. Most of the window panes are made of “old” glass, i.e. glass that was manufactured before the “plate glass” process was developed at the beginning of the 1900s. There is a certain charm in seeing the outside through “wavy” panes with occasional flaws in them, even though the distortions are minimal. Like the glass, the tiles in the hallway and the main staircase seem to me to be from the 19th century, but it’s hard to say whether that was when the building was erected. It was revamped into the present condominium enterprise 40 years ago, but probably had contained apartments long before that.
Most of the buildings on this old street are on a footprint that reaches back to 1355, when the town plan was simplified and the streets rebuilt after the Black Prince had burnt down the town in one of his French campaigns after Crécy.
That is not to say that the current buildings date back to then, but parts of them certainly do. For example, much of the restaurant just down the road (“Le Cathare”) dates from that time, as do some of the arches, stairs and courtyards of several neighbouring buildings. I even discovered what appears to be the lower part of a medieval archway at the base of this building, in the cupboard where the electric meters are hidden, but it was incorporated into much later construction.
The majority of the main buildings in the Bastide, however, were erected when the town had become very prosperous because of the textile industry in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, often replacing or incorporating older structures. After that, there was another burst of building later in the nineteenth century, when prosperity returned with new agri-industries and modern transportation links.
So, it is hard to say when our building was put up, but I dare say its bones go back centuries, even if the flesh on them has been modified to suit the times that its inhabitants have lived in.