French postcard arrives 73 years late

By James Coomarasamy BBC Paris correspondent

A French postcard has arrived at its destination - 73 years after it was originally sent.

The card was handed over to the niece of the woman for whom it was originally intended last week.

The French post office thinks it may have been languishing in a drawer for decades.

The postcard was sent in the same year as the Wall Street crash

The black-and-white postcard was sent from the Brittany port of Quiberon, on 23 August 1929.

It was written to Madame Paul Vial by her sister, who was on holiday there with her family.

Among them was her three-year-old daughter, Nicole, who last week - at the age of 76 - was handed the card by a postman.

Nicole Seratzki, as she is now called, happens to live in her late aunt's house in a village in central France.

She was, she says, greatly moved when she saw her mother's handwriting and read her account of the seaside holiday they had spent together all those years ago.

No-one has been able to tell her where the postcard has been all this time, but the French post office thinks that someone simply put it in a drawer and forgot about it - for nearly three quarters of a century.