My face was composed into one of anticipated pleasure as I went over in my head the platitudes I might be forced to use, heart sinking at the venial lies to come.

Getting out of the car I said "Bonjour Madame" to an ancient French crone who, arms folded over pinny, was openly watching the comings and goings at the house opposite. No peering through net curtains for this one. She was out and proud and probably having the most entertainment she'd had in years.

The house I was about to see for the first time was a typical village terrace in a street of similar; those outskirt streets whirled through by tourists who often comment only on their shabbiness and their firmly shuttered faces.

One rarely gets into these houses as most expats go a little mad when faced with the bounty of France and end up surrounded by acres of costly fields at a stage in their lives when weeding a window-box could be counted an extreme sport.

It's quite incomprehensible how many of us do this when our initial wishlist involved being able to walk to the boulangerie for the morning croissants and paper, to slip out to a cafe to watch life pass by, and to stroll to the centre square for an Armagnac as night falls and the bats pirouette to the sound of muted French voices.

Instead we fall for the charms, ie price, of a monstrous beast miles from anywhere that slowly saps our income, energy and, at times, will to live, and (in my case anyway) we don't just watch the bats, we end up talking to them.

However, some apply foolish Brit rules of home ownership and equate possession of house and land with one step up on the ludicrous ladder of one-upmanship.

So they ignore the village and town houses, put off by the step from pavement to front door and blank fronts, which give nothing to the onlooker.

No wonder the French think we're suckers as we refuse to compromise on land for a pool or that vegetable garden whose time and upkeep will cost more than a daily delivery from Wholefoods.

All this I know/knew; yet here I was preparing my face to "how lovely" mode on this first visit to friends' newly-acquired house.

To be fair, I'd only seen photographs of rooms overburdened with furniture, of wallpaper of extraordinary ugliness, of narrow passageways and bleak kitchen and tiny bathroom.

We looked at them in their, to me, quite lovely house, designed to their specifications from the huge blocks of stone and ruin they rescued.

A house with inner walls of honey stone and huge flagged floors with under-floor heating, a walled garden, pool and potager, entered through security gates yet comfortably in a hamlet near a large village.

It seems, as sometimes happens, when all was finished they never felt quite right, quite at peace in the house.

After a year of uncertainty last year, the husband was pronounced clear of cancer following operations and aftercare. They decided it was time to change their lives.

Not so much a downshifting as a release from the tyranny of grounds and bad memories. A desire to be able to take off for a month in the winter from ­somewhere nature wouldn't reclaim within weeks.

Townhouses rarely come up in their nearest, rather prosperous village - the centre of the Gers garlic industry. This one had languished unlooked at for quite some time but for them it was a "coup de coeur". I thought, privately, they were nuts. Knowing all this I entered the now empty house with trepidation.

I should have known better. The hall opened out on either side to spacious rooms with near floor-length windows flooding with light the oak-floored dining and sitting rooms.

The kitchen, denuded of its mish-mash of strange furniture was a clean, large space ready for a practiced eye. Upstairs four double sized bedrooms; each room with clean-cut marble fireplaces; again, as the shutters were pushed outwards, leaping alive with light and warmth.

But it was to the rear of the house my eyes kept returning. Through each long window, trees and greenery weaved and waved, in stark contrast to both the sound and view of occasional passing traffic to the front. At the end of the hall, doors opened to a small terrace and one almost blinked as if ejected into Narnia. Rolling out ahead was a breathtaking slice of multi-hued France Profonde scenery with nothing to impede the view.

Beneath the terrace and looking back to the dropped height of the house covered in vine was an intricate, once exceptional garden dependent on paths and plantings rather than on grass and pool.

Somehow there was no awareness of neighbours, albeit the comforting knowledge they were there.

My poised face had melded into truth on stepping over the front door. There was no need for lies, even venial ones. The owner, a widow, on handing them the keys, said: "Welcome to Paradise." I think they may have found it.