Mantin House
French Time Capsule-19th Century home revealed to the public
Louis Mantin, a French aesthete “obsessed with death and the passage of time,” wrote in his will that he wanted to turn his home into a museum after his death. He made a very specific and seemingly odd request, though: the museum would open 100 years after his passing.
After inheriting a large fortune from his father, Mantin, a bachelor with no children, started collecting objects obsessively–Egyptian relics, medieval locks and keys, monkey skulls, and stuffed blowfish. Having inherited the money later in life, Mantin knew that his time with his newly acquired collection would be short. The solution, he thought, was to turn his home into a museum, so people would know how an artistic gentleman had lived at the turn of the century.
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