French Rule Number Two

Today I finished reading M. Gable's book 'A Paris Apartment' (2014). What a lovely read! Continental Paris meeting USA East Coast. French style. Old continental furniture from France. The story, life and offspring of demimondaine Marthe de Florian and artist Giovanni Boldini. (With two different ancestral lines.) Marthe's face cream with lead (French 'De Plomb') that killed her.

I know this book is a work of fiction - "all of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously" - but now I am wondering what was in the real letters found at the apartment of Marthe de Florian that was unvisited for 70 years. 

I have to check out artist Boldini.

I love this (page 12): [April could almost pass for a French]. "Years ago, after she managed to snag the curator position at an eighteenth-century Paris furniture museum (now defunct), she read up on how to look Parisian. Or, rather, how not to look quite so American. Dress in smart, dark, tailored items, the literature told her; things easy to put together, to match, to throw on and look as if you'd hardly done anything at all. And that April thought, was more or less how she was thrown together. Straight, dark, tailored, made entirely of clean lines. The hair, the eyes, the nose: all casually assembled; unobjectionable basic pieces. To stand out all she needed was a jaunty scarf and a Bréton top, which was Impersonating-the-French Rule Number Two."

Boldini's card - "a present with compliments for madame M. de Florian" - as a proof of provenance of the painting.

 Picture of Marthe de Florian.

The painting Boldini made in 1898 of Marthe at the age of 24.

P.S. I wrote about her before in 2012. Remember: 'Unvisited for 70 years'?