Originally published at: What is inside an apartment in Paris abandoned for 70 years? | Boing Boing
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That article is near unreadable. It seems to be written by an AI bot and is buried in a bunch of ads.
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Okay, an automatic rent payment from an account that never ran dry for 70 years, I’ll grant, but in all those years, no one ever inspected the place to make sure the plumbing, windows, heating, etc, were okay? No changes in technology that required changing the stove from gas or whatever, updating the electrical wiring, running in cable TV…
I mean, once the water in the toilet u-bends dry up, it’ll let odours from the sewers in.
No break-ins in 70 years? That wooden door was not just a wooden door.
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That refrigerator, definitely do not eat anything in it, 70 years is a lot of science projects.
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I did wonder if it was an auto-translate from French (?).
The discovery was in 2010, wonder if researchers have been through the documents and love letters yet. There must be some reason the landlords did not need access, maybe they were unaware that the renter had not lived there for almost 70 years, I don’t know what the landlord/tenant relationship is like in France.
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That article link took me to stuff about missing submarines and a rare painting. Anyone have a good link to something about the 70 year old untouched apartment?
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This link will show some images, you will need to sign in to read the article.
The painting is part of the contents of the apartment.
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The articles I’ve found in French don’t say a lot more, or have different photos.
The upshot is that the apartment was in le quartier de Pigalle, next to the Church of The Trinity, and the owner, “Madame de Florian”, left it in 1942 and lived the rest of her life in the south of France, never returning to the apartment.
In the apartment was a painting which, after investigation, turned out to be of Madame de Florian’s grandmother, Marthe de Florian, and by the artist Giovanni Boldini, a noted artist of the Belle Epoque.
The painting, once they figured out the artist and the subject, was known to be worth something, but surprised everyone when it ended up going for €2.1million at auction.
There is a book about the discovery and the contents of the apartment, L’appartement oublié by Michelle Gable.
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But, at least, the comments section works; unlike so many other posts on this site. I understand why they won’t let us on to the BoingBoingStore; but a bunch of other posts are locked down too. Popkin’s seem to be among the worst offenders. Come on, BB, let the mutants speak.
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Click on the author’s name, scroll through their recent stories and click on the comments.
Speak mutant speak.
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Thank you. I’ll give that a go.
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Good tip!
You can also click “boingboing bbs” in the upper left corner of any discussion and it’ll take you to a full listing of comment threads.
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It was not well written, but an ad blocker and the large type meant it was was easy to skim and get the gist.
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I like this link better:
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This is a Discourse (or possibly blogger workflow) technical problem that occurs randomly and has been doing so for a long time. Nobody seems to be able to tie it down. Like all intermiittent faults it is proving hard to replicate or diagnose, I suspect.
It started with Xeni a long time ago (remember her?) on only some of her posts (which made me think ‘different workflow’ somehow at fault) but went away and then came back again more recently. As @timd says the BBS page is your saviour - go to this page and scroll or search for a keyword in the blog post title.
It is NOT any attempt to stop mutants speaking and I am sure @orenwolf and others are as annoyed about it as anyone else.
I keep that page permanently open in a pinned browser tab precisely because of this.
(Hopefully saved you having to explain it again, Ken.) 
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Thank you 
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Clearly you have never dealt with our French landlords!
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Or tenants.
My limited experience here is that rents are often regulated and as long as the tenant pays the rent on time and is not complaining, nothing needs doing. If anything goes wrong, they WILL complain and woe betide a landlord who is not paying attention.
Which might explain why an apartment was left alone for 70 years - the rent was still being paid and nobody was complaining about anything.
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