The Life and Death of Mademoiselle Havisham. Part two.

I recently found out this gem of an article in The Telegraph (www.telegraph.co.uk) . It's so beautiful that it must be shared with all lovers of vintage stories. 

Parisian flat containing €2.1 million painting lay untouched for 70 years

For 70 years the Parisian apartment had been left uninhabited, under lock and key, the rent faithfully paid but no hint of what was inside.

                        by Henry Samuel in Paris 

                                                              

Behind the door, under a thick layer of dusk lay a treasure trove of turn-of-the-century objects including a painting by the 19th century Italian artist Giovanni Boldini.

The woman who owned the flat had left for the south of France before the Second World War and never returned.

But when she died recently aged 91, experts were tasked with drawing up an inventory of her possessions and homed in on the flat near the Trinité church in Paris between the Pigalle red light district and Opera.

Entering the untouched, cobweb-filled flat in Paris' 9th arrondissement, 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. Walking under high wooden ceilings, past an old wood stove and stone sink in the kitchen, he spotted a stuffed ostrich and a Mickey Mouse toy dating from before the war, as well as an exquisite dressing table.

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.

The expert had a hunch the painting was by Boldini, but could find no record of the painting. "No reference book dedicated to Boldini mentioned the tableau, which was never exhibited," said Marc Ottavi, the art specialist he consulted about the work.

When Mr Choppin-Janvry found a visiting card with a scribbled love note from Boldini, he knew he had struck gold. "We had the link and I was sure at that moment that it was indeed a very fine Boldini".

He finally found a reference to the work in a book by the artist's widow, which said it was painted in 1898 when Miss de Florian was 24.

The starting price for the painting was €300,000 but it rocketed as ten bidders vyed for the historic work. Finally it went under the hammer for €2.1 million, a world record for the artist.

"It was a magic moment. One could see that the buyer loved the painting; he paid the price of passion," said Mr Ottavi.

Les Roses sur une toile

The Rose Painting has been in my family for generations- two, or maybe three.  Always hanging against the east wall, reminding me of a distant past that I can only imagine intangibly.  Bucharest at the turn of the century was beautiful, polished, dashing, with busy streets and markets, shops full of happy customers and artists meeting in literary cafes discussing world affairs.  This is why it was known as the Paris of the East, le Petit Paris. Hemingway and TS Eliot wouldn’t have been out of place at a sidewalk cafe on Victoriei Boulevard.

It’s hard to imagine Bucharest as it was before the war. Time and history scarred the city to such an extent that reconstruction is possible only by reading memoirs, looking at photos in sepia, and vivid artistry.

What do I really know about my hometown at the time when it had a life of its own? About its stories and about its sagas? How did people cope with life, with love, with despair, with injustice, with death? Did they hope for a better future?  How did they deal with the fall of everything they held dear (freedom, ownership) and the accession to power of a new regime of state ownership and totalitarianism?

So, all I have is a painting from the era I love the most, though I can’t put my finger on it and say why I love it so much.  I guess we all, collectively, love the old and the vintage, the pristine, virgin beauty of a distant past that is now deeply set in our hearts.

I remember I was a merely six or seven and my mother and I visited a distant aunt, the daughter of the painter whose canvas is now displayed as my background. She lived in an old, pre-war block of flats in Brasov, the traditional gateway to Transylvania.  We paid her a short visit one hot summer afternoon. Tanti Lizica was old and a vegetarian.  Her flat was covered in canvas, all painted by her father, S. (Starvu) Tarasov.  The etching on the right bottom of the canvas had been blurred by the merciless passage of time.

I don’t know what happened to her, nor to her heritage.  Her father, although exceptionally talented, had never found the fame he sought and deserved, either in life or in death. However,  I remember her as the Young Woman Playing the Violin. I glance at her every time I visit my parents’ house.  Then, all the memories come back to me: my holidays in Brasov, or my childhood when I would play Doll’s House under the dining table.  I would get all romantic and sentimental thinking about the old time and wondering “what if…?”

What if that golden age had never ended?

What if the war had never happened?

What if the forest fire of Communism hadn’t engulfed half of Europe?

What if the disease of corruption and petty greed, euphemistically known as ‘the transition’, hadn’t infected our already scarred nation two decades ago, just as the Ceausescu cancer was excised?

Would we have become something different? Something better? Something worse?

We shall never know, and it is as well that we won’t.  The reality is that history cannot be altered, we can never go back and there is no point in trying.  Looking back would simply cause us to trip and stumble as we walk forward.

All we can do is look towards the future with the memory of past glories and the experience of past mistakes to guide us.