Our tireless French real estate agent had one more idea. A place that had “just come on the market” … located in the village of Autignac, which is a fairly charming village.

So we said yes. We would have a look at it.

We didn’t know we were about to enter the sprawling home of the French answer to Charles Dicken’s Miss Havisham from the 1861 novel Great Expectations.

“Creepy” only begins to describe it.

So, the 40-minute drive over to Autignac, and we parked about 20 feet from a place we had looked at way back on Saturday, the one with oddly proportioned bedrooms and the impossibly tight spiral stair case.

This one was a few blocks away. I thought we were being led to No. 15, and I did a mental “hmm, looks interesting” … but no, we were going to No. 19, which looked fairly run down, from outside.

Then we went inside.

I don’t know if one elderly woman lives in there. Or recently lived in there. It might have been an elderly man. Or a couple of them.

But the place looked as if it hadn’t had a single change in decades. Maybe a century. I kid you not.

The family photos on the walls were the sepia-toned work of the early 20th century, or even the late 19th.

In the master bedroom, a prominently displayed document (on a dresser) with two medals attached, under glass, celebrated the achievements of a man from The Great War. Which is what people called World War I (1914-1918) before World War II came along. It appears that the recipient of the document had been taken prisoner by the Germans in September of 1914 — which means he could have been in German custody for four full years.

Seemingly every room — and the place had about 15 rooms — had several religious photos, and many had crucifixes on the wall. Including one in which Jesus appears to be about 50 percent decomposed. What possessed any artist to create that …

If our realtor had told us that no one had lived in the place since 1950, I would have believed it. Yet there were some features that seemed to indicate fairly recent habitation. A modern toaster-oven. A package of coffee left out. A photo of the current pope, who took over in 2005 … which means someone was living in the place at least after April of that year.

What made the overall effect more unsettling was the cramped nature of what was a sprawling property. It seemed to have been broken down into tight rooms over a span of many years, till it was difficult to move around the strange doors and passageways — including one door hacked through a wall to enter the bathroom from an adjoining bedroom. (I am now reminded of the Winchester Mystery House.)

The house had one great feature: a terrace off the master bedroom with a stunning view across the fields to the hills to the north.

But another story higher, it immediately turned creepy again — three small bedrooms, perhaps “maid’s quarters” that each looked as if someone had slept in them, gotten out of bed and left, never to return — 50 years ago.

The place had, of course, an enormous and empty attic, in which was stored thousands of roof tiles. And it had a similarly enormous basement/garage accessible via a tiny door in the ridiculously small kitchen. (On our first pass, we missed the door entirely.)

The garage had the remnants of a wine press (we were told; or actually, I was told, because Leah refused to go through the tiny kitchen door and into the dark).

The whole effect was disconcerting.Within 60 seconds of being inside the place, I knew I would never, ever buy it or live in it, even it was enormous and even if the price was fairly low.

Our agent pushed it very hard, suggesting it needed almost no improvements and would appreciate significantly When, clearly, it would involve taking a mountain of junk out of it, and then refurnishing a place with about 2,000 square feet of space. And all the wall paper would have to come out. Actually, it would have to be gutted and redone before I could even begin to think of spending a single night inside.

I didn’t actually see a rotting wedding cake with mice (was it?) running through holes in it … nor did I see a wedding dress or an older woman wearing one. But it would not have surprised me.

But I did have a sense of the place being frozen in time. For Miss Havisham it was 8:40 a.m.; in one of the clocks I saw, it was 4:45. Morning or afternoon, I don’t know.