Bell Tower dead end

From the dead end of the Bell Tower, it is often its last part that is chosen by artists and photographers. Marguerite Sagrini, for her part, chose another point of view, favouring the magnificent half-timbered house which for a few years housed Pierre Feille's gallery before he moved to rue de l'Église. It was the latter who restored it in the 1980s.

This is a beautiful bourgeois house, dated from the mid-16^th century by researchers from the Mérimée database. It was therefore the seat of 1621. Its rooms are decorated with spectacular stone fireplaces. Invisible detail: the floors are served by a spiral staircase, the core of which is a tree trunk over 10 metres long! SIf its north facade on the cul-de-sac is half-timbered on a brick ground floor, its south facade, overlooking the Lot is entirely of brick, in which beautiful mullioned white stone windows open.

Although adjoining the abbey, there is no trace of belonging to the latter, at least since the 17^th century. On the other hand, along the south side of the nave of the church, its garden belonged to the abbey and was sold as such during the Revolution at the time of the sale of the Biens Nationaux, described as a vegetable garden; before that, it was probably the monks' cemetery.
The historian Claude Martin hypothesized that it may have housed the first Roman abbot, Paolo Garganti, during the restoration of the abbey from 1604.

It later belonged to Master Luc Bertrand, notary – among others – of Montesquieu; it then passed to the Geneste and often changed hands in the 1800s: on the 16^th of Floreal year V, Marie-Anne Geneste sold the house to her brother “Paul Geneste, homme de loy habitant Laparade”; two years later, the house was sold to Pierre de Laguehay, then by his nephews (Pierre de Laguehay and Henriette de Léaumont) to Jonathan de Viçose, on the 8th of August 1820. But his daughter sold it in 1834 to... Ferdinand de Léaumont! It passed to his heirs, the Beausobre family; hence the name that some Clairacais still call it: the Beausobre house.
On the left, we also see a more modest house which followed the same real estate hazards; it was Emmanuel de Beausobre who had it transformed in a neo-Renaissance spirit around 1920 by the Durands, clairacais builders. Above its door, one can read this Latin maxim: Parva domus, magna quies (Small house, great rest).

The Faragou family had hatters in their family, a profession that was widespread in Clairac. At the age of 45, Marguerite Faragou married Gabriel Sagrini (mayor of Bourran from 1929 to 1933), son of Charles Sagrini, piano teacher, and Marthe Larrat. This late marriage allows us to date her works, sometimes signed Marguerite Faragou, or MF, or Marguerite Sagrini after her marriage in Bordeaux in 1920. Mr. and Mrs. Sagrini lived in the former Poulard estate in Saint-Brice. Some former Clairacais still remember Mrs Sagrini coming to Clairac in her horse-drawn cart. In the 1960s, on the advice of Claude Martin, she gave the Departmental Archives of Agen many of the archives kept at Poulard, collected by Dr Larrat, the former mayor of Clairac. This “fonds Sagrini” is well known to all those who work on the history of our city.
Marguerite Sagrini possessed a real artistic talent and represented many of Clairac's picturesque viewpoints, often in watercolours, preserved in the Clairacais families.