A lot more than dust...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/8042281/Parisian-flat-containing-2.1-million-painting-lay-untouched-for-70-years.html

That... was amazing. That story kind of took my breath away. Real-life soap opera Victor Lord secret room-type stuff (but not creepy). I get antsy when I leave my apartment left alone for a week. It's like having a jewelry box tucked away in a closet for decades, your own little secret, but on a grander scale.

Edited October 9, 201015 yr by SFK

I'm glad you felt the way I did. How sad am I that the item I most wanted to see was the Mickey Mouse toy. It's very interesting though. Did no one go in this apartment for 70 years? Did someone ever go in to clean or keep bugs out? How did this place escape being looted? Or becoming some type of Nazi property during the war? Did this woman have any family? Who will inherit?

I first saw this as Go Fug Yourself and then thought some here might be interested.

Edited October 9, 201015 yr by CarlD2

Yeah, good questions. I guess it's a lot like living in any large city. People mind their own business and live in their own little bubbles, and with that comes the good and the bad. Reminds me a lot of a program I watched just last night on Animal Planet where a guy in Harlem kept a menagerie of exotic animals, most notably a full-grown tiger! He lived alone, only his family knew his secret, he was on some zen sh!t and barely left his house... living with the tiger was a spiritual experience for him. Until he rescued an alley cat and the tiger went for the cat one day, the guy intervened and the tiger went to town on his leg. He had no choice but to go the the ER where he fibbed and said he got attacked by a pitbull. Someone tipped off the poilce, and there was an out of this world episode with the police drilling a hole from the next apartment, sending a parascope up from the apartment beloW, and ultimately scaling the bulding and shooting the tiger with a tranquilizer through the window before recovering it. The guy served 6 months on Riker's for keeping the dangerous creature in his home. Crazy stuff.

Were there "dramatizations" of this?

Edited October 9, 201015 yr by Amello

Some, like shaky cam of the dude's face going "Ahhh!" and the tiger snarling, but mostly just interviews with those involved (the guy and his highly entertaining brother) and actual news/police footage that I remember quite well from when I was living in Harlem and it aired on the local news a few years ago.

This has shipped me right into a whole different era... Thank you, Carl, for bringing it up. A lovely story.

Did she just forget about the flat or what? I can't believe she'd just leave all that stuff behind and then forget to return to at least get the stuff and move out the flat

I think she just didn't bother, que sera sera romanticism, "Perhaps I'll get to it someday" kinda thing...

And in other news, Palais Montmorency is on sale for $140 million.