Historic coin stash worth €2m unearthed in wall of French house
12 June 2025, 15:30
A thousand historic gold coins worth about €2 million have been found in a wall of a storage room in southwestern France.
Listen to this article
Loading audio...
A trove of coins discovered in house in France have gone on sale in Paris this week, and are said to be worth up to €2 million.
The coins, which run from ancient Greece and Byzantium through Gaul and the Middle Ages to the 19th century, were collected over a lifetime by Paul Narce, a resident of Castillonnès, a small hilltop market town.
When Narce, a reclusive man with a handicap, died aged 89 last August, the notary in charge of his estate heard from villagers that he had spent all his spare money collecting coins with his sister Claudette, who lived with him.
Narce had no children or direct heirs and had been in a care home after his sister had died a year earlier.
Read more: Newly discovered ‘Dragon Prince’ dinosaur rewrites history of T.rex
Read more: Royal Mint unveils first-ever fashion house coins to mark 150 years of Liberty
After an extensive search of the modest stone house, the notary was about to give up. Then he looked behind a picture on the wall of a storage room, packed with fishing rods and garden tools.
Built into the wall was a chest containing the trove, meticulously labelled, along with ten cloth pouches, each containing 172 “Napoléons”, as 20 franc French gold coins are known.
Experts were impressed by the quality, rarity and historical breadth of a collection assembled by a man unknown in the world of numismatics.
“I have never seen such a major collection go on sale from the point of view of quantity and quality,” Thierry Parsy, an expert, said. Narce “knew what he was buying,” he added.
The Drouot auction house in Paris estimated the coins at €2 million before the sale in separate lots. The Napoléons, worth about €100,000, are to be sold separately.
Pierre Sicaud, the village mayor, said no one had imagined that Narce and his sister had amassed such a valuable collection.
“They were very polite, very modest people who lived in an ordinary house a stone’s throw from the mairie,” he told the Sud Ouest newspaper.
![Sir Keir Starmer has called on Vladimir Putin to "stop dragging his heels and get to the [negotiating] table", as Trump calls the Russian president "misguided."](https://images.lbc.co.uk/images/734580?width=320&crop=16_9&format=webp&signature=hCtUT-QBb1QuxMxVTF6Ch2nl6Ow=)
