There is something about France that pulls so many people across the Channel into its maw - generation after generation.

When not slugging it out over the centuries, we've cooed over her and tried hard to woo her.

She, on the other hand, rarely, if ever, wooed us - feigning patrician indifference and distaste for our British ways.

But still we've come to her shores; whether aggressively, or, much more recently, in peace and love and foolish hope and often doomed dreams.

Even people who have never set foot in l'hexigone have an accordion riffing La Vie En Rose moment when thinking of Paris, the Riviera, vin rouge, baguettes … ah, you know the words; you hear it in your head.

I would suggest it is the greatest love story in history. Tentatively suggest, that is.

Like all classic amours it begins in lust and covetousness, has a brief united passion that soon disintegrates into betrayal and hate; a long hiatus of indifference followed by a re-awakening of interest and attraction, and off we go on the merry-go-round again.

I no longer understand the game having lived here these years. Yet that statement too is a lie - it's the sentence of one grown cold and seeking distance; needing to seek distance.

The disappointed lover, let down by ludicrous fantasies that this one would be THE one; the one to fulfil every secret wish of things to come.

No-one, nowhere is the one.

So many have travelled to France over the decades only to see their dreams dashed with the harsh realities of foreign life.

We seem to think that only the special, the adventurers, the desperate, sought other countries - not the journeymen, the maids, and the shy country people with little learning or yearning.

So it came as a surprise to me to learn last week of a barely known charity that has been in existence for 200 years in France with the sole purpose of helping destitute British people.

It came into being after the fall of Napoleon. With high unemployment at home, thousands of workers - servants, builders, seamstresses, governesses - flocked to Paris to seek their fortune.

Many went under, failing to find jobs or became easy victims of fraudsters.

In 1823 the British Charitable Fund (BCF) was formed to come to "the relief of distressed British subjects" in the capital.

"The widow and the orphan, the sick and the aged, present themselves, in succession, for food, and raiment, and medical assistance," reads an appeal for funds in 1827. "The houseless wanderer in a foreign land solicits conveyance to his native home; the friendless and forsaken claim consolation and protection."

The BCF's files wax and wane as wars and famine come to Paris and the poor knock on their doors, many desperate to leave the slums of the city.

Even today, with British people able to seek state help, there are 120 individuals in France dependent on the charity.

They include a family in a remote village in Poitou who were hit by accident and illness, leaving them unable to work and entirely dependent on a monthly cheque from the charity.

In Paris, a stroke-hit English pensioner who can no longer work is given money to pay his rent and for his food. A caseworker gives him the intangible extra of emotional support, vital when alone and friendless in an alien world.

Now BCF is seeing a new wave of appellants - pensioners who bought in isolated rural areas. Properties have slumped in value and can't be sold; the lengthy fall in sterling hitting their pensions, plus the ever-increasing food prices. Many cannot even contemplate selling even if they could. The meagre amount they'd make would not be enough to buy a house in the UK. So they are trapped, frightened of the future and often isolated by their inability to speak the language.

Other callers have been felled by accidents and sickness.

It's too easy to say, "well, hell mend them, they should have thought all that through before coming."

I'm sure most did but, when in the grip of love, one brushes away the niggling doubts that perhaps the future requires more than a leap of faith.

A couple I met a while ago was doing well here. Their children had known only France and they ran a successful gardening business. A fall from a tree he was pruning ended that life in a matter of seconds. Now disabled and unable to operate the machinery for the job, his wife too slight, they are existing on benefits, hating every moment.

The animals on their smallholding have gone and the house is listed with several agents. Not one viewing has been arranged.

They need to go back to Britain to get help from their families and, yes, better benefits.

They don't want to, and remain baffled as to their situation. "In all the possible scenarios we worked out before we came here," said the wife, "a simple accident was never thought of.

"We felt sure we could cope with anything because it was all we ever dreamed of and wanted."

Sadly, as with love, wanting and dreaming is often not quite enough to carry things through.