Don't forget too that France took a good few years to recover from the ravages of WWII, so it's not unusual to see all sorts of ingenious work-arounds on properties of this age.

I once saw a French house in which at least half the walls had been built entirely from roofing tiles, overlapped horizontally and cemented together! Oh, and the wiring was euqally as, er, interesting....... [Linked Image]