A Paris Apartment ~~Unlocked

From the Daily Mail, May 2014

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“Caked in dust and full of turn-of-the century treasures, this Paris apartment is like going back in time.

Having lain untouched for seven decades the abandoned home was discovered three years ago after its owner died aged 91.

The woman who owned the flat, a Mrs De Florian, had fled for the south of France before the outbreak of the Second World War.

She never returned and in the 70 years since, it looks like no-one had set foot inside.

The property was found near a church in the French capital’s 9th arrondissement, between Pigalle red light district and Opera. Experts were tasked with drawing up an inventory of her possessions which included a painting by the 19th century Italian artist Giovanni Boldini.

One expert said it was like stumbling into the castle of Sleeping Beauty, where time had stood still since 1900. ‘There was a smell of old dust,’ said Olivier Choppin-Janvry, who made the discovery.

But he said his heart missed a beat when he caught sight of a stunning tableau of a woman in a pink muslin evening dress.

The painting was by Boldini and the subject a beautiful Frenchwoman who turned out to be the artist’s former muse and Mrs de Florian’s grandmother, Marthe de Florian, a beautiful French actress and socialite of the Belle Époque.

When the apartment’s contents were discovered, Boldini’s painting was without a signature and no records of the work were found in reference books to prove it was his. But art experts managed to locate a mention of the work in a memoir by the famed painter’s widow, and they dated the painting to 1898.  Their suspicions were confirmed by a stack of love letters found in the apartment that were wrapped in different coloured ribbons and scrawled in the hand of, among others, Boldini and 72nd French Prime Minister George Clemenceau.”

If this fantastical tale of a shuttered apartment, a glamorous turn-of-the-century socialite, and a long-lost masterpiece sounds like something out of a novel, then you won’t be surprised to discover it has become the foundation of one.

Look what I started reading last night,

 

 

 

 

A Paris Apartment by Michelle Gable, is a fictional account of a Sotheby’s furniture specialist who takes refuge in an apartment not dissimilar to that of deFlorian, where she finds secrets in the “letters and journals written by the woman in the painting, documents showing she was more than a renowned courtesan with enviable décolletage.” 

 

I had heard this novel was based upon a real story of an apartment in Paris abandoned for 70 years, so of course had to do the research this morning.

 

Stay tuned.  I’m reading as fast as I can.

 

 

HERE is a video about it, but be warned – you must pause during the text as it flashes by too quickly to read.