The owner of the apartment hid all her life that she had this home, even from her relatives.
Madame de Florian died when she was 91. Looking through the documents of the grandmother, the relatives were amazed. It turns out that their older relative, who had never (as they thought) was in Paris, paid all her life to rent an apartment in one of the districts of the French capital. The woman never once said a word that she had housing in France.
It turns out that Madame de Florian fled Paris when she was only 23 years old. It was 1939, and the Germans were attacking France. The girl simply locked the doors with a key and left for the south of Europe. She never really was in Paris again.
The heirs found specialists who were instructed to draw up an inventory of the property that had been kept in grandmother’s apartment for all these 70 years. To say that the experts were amazed upon entering the apartment is an understatement.
“I thought I stumbled upon Sleeping Beauty’s castle.” auctioneer Olivier Chopin, who was the first to enter an apartment forgotten for decades.
Time seemed to stop there, shrouded in dust, cobwebs and silence. Inside was the furnishings of the early 1890s, completely untouched. An old wood stove, a stone sink in the kitchen, an exquisite dressing table cluttered with cosmetics. In the corner is a toy Mickey Mouse and Porky’s pig. The paintings stood on chairs, removed from the walls, as if they were about to be taken away, but changed their minds.
One of the canvases struck Olivier Chopin to the core. It was a portrait of a woman in a pink evening dress. As it turned out, the painting belonged to the famous Italian artist Giovanni Boldini. And the beautiful Frenchwoman depicted on it was Martha de Florian, the grandmother of the girl who left the apartment in a hurry.
Martha de Florian was a famous actress. The list of her admirers included the most famous people of that time, up to the Prime Minister of France. And Giovanni Boldini, for whom Marta became a muse.
The painting was unknown to the general public. Not a single reference book, not a single encyclopedia about Boldini mentioned her. But the artist’s signature, his love letters, and expertise eventually dot the i’s.
The portrait of Martha de Florian was put up for auction with a starting price of 300 euros. They sold in the end for 000 million. This painting has become the most expensive of all painted by the artist.
By the way, this apartment is closed to this day. The public can’t get there. These apartments near Trinity Church are estimated at 10 million euros.
And there is another wonderful story: the grandchildren were sure that a treasure was hidden in the old house of the deceased grandmother. After all, a woman once actively participated in auctions, buying up valuables, communicating with antique dealers. So these treasures must be hidden somewhere! But where exactly – the heirs could not find. And they had to … hire professionals to search the property to fix the problem. And the specialists coped with the task with a bang – they found a real treasure in grandma’s house. Well, what exactly, read HERE.
This is far from all that was in the cache.
By the way
However, as experience shows, not every old apartment is fraught with treasures and looks like an enchanted castle. On a popular real estate portal, we found an advertisement for the sale of housing in an old house built at the beginning of the last century. A beautiful building, a great area, a huge area of the apartment, the number of rooms is difficult to even count, but I don’t want to live there at all. And not even because the price is huge – almost 150 million rubles. But because it looks like a museum, and by no means fine arts. A collection of photographs from this miracle house can be viewed at the link.
One of the rooms of the retro apartment