Beautiful and exotic guns, works of art in the higher grades. I bought a heart-stopping 28 gauge R-15 from Steve Barnett at the Southern SxS about 12 years ago but sold it to help pay for a $4K abdominal surgery on my English setter when he wolfed some hard plastic trash somewhere in the woods on one of our woodcock hunting forays. Ingenious and simplistic in their design, they seem to befuddle people who have never seen or handled one before, dealing with the sliding breech and especially operating the side safety.
Hundreds of them were sent to Viet Nam; the French bought them and stocked the PXs and armories with them there so their soldiers could hunt with them; some have the funky "stock in sling" setup not unlike other Euro military firearms. Most if not all of these are plain field grade guns.
I corresponded with Ted Schefelbein during the time I owned my Darne; he was always helpful and a wealth of obscure information on them. I almost bought a rough R 12 16 gauge recently, but couldn't find any definitive Darne proor or makers mark on it; then I remembered from Ted that it was not uncommon especially during transition periods (e.g., Darne to Paul Brouchet & viz.) for whomever was building the actions to farm them out to nearby finishers for final production and proofing, very much the same as some top end British makers did with Birmingham and in some cases London 'best' guns.
I couldn't reach a deal with the owner of the Darne 16 ga, he convinced that it was a 'one-off custom gun by an elite French maker". In truth a common field grade gun, if I ever get my hands on it, I may have Geoffroy turn it into a V-22!!
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