In 1973, my wife and I answered an advertisement in The Sunday Times for a holiday home in Lot-et-Garonne, then a very rural département in southwest France. Following through proved more complicated than we had expected.

The advertisers (who later became good friends) were unknown to the property’s owner and had no authority whatsoever to deal with the house; they were simply acting on a rumour that it was for sale. Yet through English acquaintances who had been living in the area for several years, we made contact with the owner, a tough, elderly wood merchant who, as it turned out, would have no truck with middlemen.

To start with, as we sat in the living room of the English couple’s restored farmhouse, a few miles away, it looked as if the owner and his wife would have no truck with us, either. The first quarter of an hour of our meeting was passed in chat about the weather.

Two things loosened up proceedings. I was recovering from jaundice, and looked so awful, he reckoned I would be a pushover. Then our daughter, aged eight, piped up in the perfect French accent she had acquired at the Lycée in London. The wood merchant and his wife simultaneously broke out with “Ah, Parisien!”. While a Parisian accent in an adult would not necessarily have been a recommendation in Lot-et-Garonne, in a child it seemed quaint and endearing.

What’s more, the jaundice paid off. So exhausted did I become that after an hour’s haggling I struggled — with difficulty — to my feet,muttering that that was that, then, and headed for bed. Next morning, the wife telephoned to accept my offer of about £10,000. I later heard that the wood merchant had thought me a formidable negotiator.

More than three decades later, our neighbourhood, the area around Monflanquin and Montpazier, is teeming with estate agents. Then, the only one we came across — who was also promoting “our” house without authority from its owner — conducted her business, or what there was of it, from her kitchen.

Yet had we been househunting 100 years earlier in Paris or on the Riviera, on the Channel coast or in Pau, close to the Pyrenees, we would have found a property without difficulty. The British who took houses or flats in such places, more usually to rent or lease than to buy, were efficiently served.

John Taylor & Son, a well-known firm founded by the gardener toone of the earlier British settlers at Cannes, acted as estate agent, banker, wine merchant and furniture supplier. It is very much alive today, although no longer connected to the original family. Mr Willoughby, just along the coast at Menton and originally a grocer, did much the same thing.

Such firms supplied servants and looked after empty properties. For a while, many Britons, most obviously those involved in business there, lived in France all year; others, like my wife and I now, spent only a few months, or even just weeks, there each year.

The idea of writing a book about the British in France over the past 200 years came to me during a conversation with an erudite French friend. He was talking of the multitude of Britons who once patronised the “watering places” — the spas of the Pyrenees — during the winter for reasons of health. We went on to discuss why else they came: to Paris, for example, for fun, food, gambling and sex; to the Alps, to climb mountains; or to Bordeaux, for business. We agreed that the interaction of British visitors and French hosts was sometimes rather comic.

The attraction of unspoilt countryside was much less of a draw than it is today: in the 19th and early 20th centuries, there was plenty of that back home. And, in the days before the railways — which, in general, arrived 15 or so years later than in Britain — travelling backwards and forwards to remote départements was a laborious affair.

Surprisingly, perhaps, the railways made little difference to where people settled. There were enterprising Britons such as Robert Louis

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