little abandoned school class in France...

La petite ecole abondonne

Au revoir Paris.. and that treasure you have always dreamed to find once.....

Au revoir Paris.... After a few days in Paris by myself I left the city from Gare de l'Est and took a train into the countryside to join my family for a little vacation in the Champagne-Ardennes region. They stayed in their country house in a small village with apparently only 110 inhabitants -I have seen ten of them in a week!- They invited friends and family to come along.... So every day new people joined us and of course we celebrated their company with a few bottles of champagne.

My cousin and I like to dream and talk about the old houses that are up for sale in the region and fantasy about what we could do with them. Being interested in buying one, we went to see the back of an old house in the middle of a village that she had seen. We could see the big white house, balcony's and blue shutters but could not see the garden because there was a little building at the back. A building with a door...

We tried to open the door and were surprised we could easily go in.... It was a bit dirty and we found old zinc baskets, old tools to work the fields... lots of dusty tiles and a door with a little hallway and a stair in the back. We could see the garden with orange pumpkins totally grown out of proportion, but were more curious to see what was above at the stairs....

When we opened the door we were blown away and felt to have entered a long forgotten place. It was difficult to understand what it was.. there was a cupboard full with books and even more on the shelves against the walls... a table, old chairs and a work bench that I would have loved to bring home with me. Around the room were all kind of Micky Mouse scenes drawn on the walls. Mickey Mouse with big ears, the ears of this figure changed somewhere in the 40's into smaller ones.

The sun shined through the windows with their green shutters.. and we could only fantasy about what had happened in this room and look through all the books and manuscripts.

We thought It might have been a private school class maybe as we found different literature, history, geography and mats books and lots of 'devoirs' exercise books with different names.

It was a bit spooky and strange in there and every moment I expected the gendarmerie to come in .. When I look at the pictures I still wish we brought more of those documents... let alone that workbench or little bistro chair.


Some documents, geography home work... and a license to teach at primary school from 1887