When, in 1792, the inventory of the abbey's property had been made before it was sold as national property, it was called the “house of the nuns”; letters exchanged in 1787 with Jacques-Antoine de Lartigue – who created a life annuity for him – allow us to know that the superior was then Sister Jeanne Laborde. With an area of 48 toises and 18 feet, the house also includes a courtyard with a capacity of 50 toises and 18 feet “including the gallery”. On the ground floor there is a “large classroom”, another room and a kitchen; upstairs a “large room for the boarders, a small room for a nun, the prayer room and the nuns' room”. The whole was sold for 736 francs to the Clairacais Etienne Loubet, doctor of medicine, on the 3rd pluviôse of the year VIII. It was later a convent where Catholic teaching was given: the enumeration (census) of 1856 tells us that the Mother Superior, Josephine Marie Loubet (54 years old), and five nuns lived there: Marie Bazire, Marguerite Buisson, Catherine Rey, Jeanne Lamorère, Egeria Hamilton ; the Mother Superior was the daughter of Etienne Loubet, born on the 29th germinal of the year IX. The house later became the property of the Diocese of Agen, before being sold to a private individual in 2017.
Thanks to the old postcards, we keep a souvenir of the Saint-Foy institution. At that time, a large wrought iron mission cross adorned the square; in December 1963, the parish council gave the town hall permission to replace it with the stone mission cross of the Place du Fort; it was then moved to the courtyard of the convent.
It was through his marriage that Alexandre Canelle de Lalobbe (1848-1919) from Champagne arrived in Clairac, where he bought the Sinange property in 1909. A former officer, he had left the army following his wounds at the famous Battle of Woerth in 1870. As a young man, he had taken lessons from the painter Cals, husband of one of his cousins. From 1881, he exhibited regularly at the Salon des artistes français in Paris. A painter of nature, he travelled around with his easel but also worked from the many photographs he took. In Clairac, he found a light that he had probably sought all his life, in the line of the work of the Impressionists two decades earlier: in his paintings, he played with the sparkling sky of the Lot valley, the reds of the tiles and shutters, the greens of the vines but also of the cypresses, the pastel shades of hollyhocks which were one of his favourite motifs. On the eve of his death in January 1919, he was still painting the effects of light on snow in Sinange.
