We each received a letter in the mail on Wednesday 13 February. I had been expecting them.

We had posted additional information to the immigration office in Montpellier in mid December last year, just after we arrived here in Fenouillet.

With some trepidation, we opened our letters and (attempted to) read the material. We could easily understand that the government officials had received our letter on 17 December last year, just over nine weeks ago! Mick had thought that ‘no news’ meant ‘good news’ i.e. everything was ok.

With the help of Google Translate, I tried to understand what the last paragraph meant, knowing that was where the ‘punch line’ usually lay.

La présente attestation ne présage pas de la suite qui pourra être réservée à cette demande, en raison de la necessaire presentation ultérieure de documents complémentaires.

What????

This certificate does not presage the continuation that may be reserved for this request, because of the need for further presentation of additional documents.

What???

What additional documents?

And, what does PRESAGE mean?

No further information was included in our letters.

Our next step was to show these to Monsieur R in the hope he understood what the letters meant.

As it turned out, Monsieur R arrived that very afternoon the letters had arrived and he volunteered to take them away with him and to phone the Immigration Office to see if there was anything further we had to do.

After more than a week, Monsieur R returned our letters. He had had no luck getting anyone to answer the phone number that was listed on our letter.

So, Mick and I are not going to worry. We leave our current house sit in less than a week and move on to our next house sitting assignment, but one very useful piece of evidence that came out of us receiving these letters is that now we have proof of our address in France, which could be very handy.