Finding something over 50 years old for this week’s edition of Cee’s Black & White Photo Challenge isn’t the hard part. Just looking in the mirror solves that problem.

However, to spare all of us the ordeal of a self-portrait, here are three photographs taken in a chateau in Sarlat, which is set up as it might have looked in the sevententh century (way more than fifty years ago).

This old book (Proceedings of the Committee on French Africa – riveting stuff) is artfully placed on a desk, but I liked the cropped version showing the book itself and the (also artfully placed) reading glasses:

Sepia seemed the most appropriate colour cast for this formal dining-room:

But my favourite image is this one. A quasi-impressionist view through some very old window-panes, the antiquity of which is attested by the fact that they’re full of bubbles, showing that they were made in the days before glaziers had mastered the techniques of producing absolutely clear glass in mass-market quantities: