Almost a week has passed since the American election and still French newspapers are harping on, albeit a little more generally, about their beloved Amérique. This weekend’s Lifestyle section was crammed with Franco-American connections: the new expo at Paris’ Hotel de Ville called Paris, Seen from Hollywood (a post forthcoming about this); or the great friendship between our Founding Father, Thomas Jefferson, and pre-revolutionary France; or even still the current rage Michelle Obama’s wardrobe is having on her French counterparts.

No, he assured me. The building we all recognize as the American White House was apparently copied from a château in southwestern France by Thomas Jefferson when he visited the area in 1789.

The house’s history and connection to the White House is convoluted but interesting. Almost three hundred years ago, the Marquis de Cropt de Rastignac had plans drawn up for a new family plot upon the ruins of an estate in Dordogne that had been in his family since the Middle Ages. In the 1780s, the plans were sent to l’Ecole d’architecture de Bordeaux where, as it just so happened, Thomas Jefferson visited in the late 1780s.

The French version of the house was burned by the Germans in 1944 during the Second World War so for almost half a century pretty much all that was left of the mansion was the neoclassic façade which so resembles the famous South Portico of the American White House. About ten years ago, the mansion was refurbished into large apartments and is now a residential property so it is not open for visits, although passersby can grab more than a generous glimpse of the stately building from the forest and parks that surround it.