In France’s Dordogne, a land of castles and caves, untouched by time
When our children were 11 and 9, young enough to still be entirely inside the family circle but old enough to remember, we splurged on a “once in a lifetime vacation ” and rented a small farmhouse in Southwestern France outside the village of Saint-Cyprien. Each day, our son and daughter would say goodbye to the donkey that hung around our patio and we’d climb in the tiny rented Renault and drive somewhere in the fairy- tale beautiful Dordogne River region . On one of these excursions, we stumbled on the provincial city of Sarlat. An accident of history and several centuries of stagnant economy had left Sarlat’s center virtually unchanged architecturally since the days of siege engines and knights galloping over drawbridges. City fathers had wakened one morning in the late 1950s to realize that, leaning above narrow and winding cobblestone streets and alleys, they had one of the largest collections of intact medieval architecture in Europe. The French government subsidized restor...