Abandoned Paris apartment

Beauties, I am in love with this real-life story of a recently discovered Paris apartment, left empty but untouched, as though invisibly lived in for well over 50 years.

I don’t know which is more captivatingly beautiful: the photos of the apartment itself and its layers of dusty, beautiful, captivating things in subdued eggshell blue and buttermilk tones, or the story of the woman who once lived there, her painting, and a great love.

I just had to share this particularly whimsical paragraph written about the find by Henry Samuel for his article in The Telegraph newspaper:

‘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 whose granddaughter it was who had left the flat uninhabited for more than half a century.

The muse was Marthe de Florian, an actress with a long list of ardent admirers, whose fervent love letters she kept wrapped neatly in ribbon and were still on the premises. Among the admirers was the 72nd prime minister of France, George Clemenceau, but also Boldini.’

Gosh!

*Photos courtesy Getty images, via The Telegraph.