A wealthy New York lady returned from Paris to find her maid had stolen all her furniture; police and a private agency found nothing. Neville had her sit in his apartment and mentally refurnish her own apartment; that week, an accidental wrong turn on Madison Avenue brought her face to face with the maid, who led her to the stored furniture, and she had it back within the week.
Date (happened)
c. 1900
stated · doubtful · preferred
Reasoning
|| v1.1/l1.4/sentinel1900: year 1900 here is not a date. `corpus v1 / phase3b` emitted it as a placeholder for "unknown, sometime before the telling" whenever the speaker used a vague temporal phrase — this row's own source note is the phrase. The same sentinel was identified and converged on in run v1.1/l0.5/retype/w1-conv. It carried confidence `probable`, which no evidence supported. Lowered to `doubtful`; an honest `before 1972-05-25` bound is appended alongside from the telling lecture (nid 27). Nothing deleted, no year invented.
before 25 May 1972
bound
Source
bound from the telling lecture nid 27 (1972-05-25)
Reasoning
The event is told in the past tense in nid 27, delivered 1972-05-25 (that claim's confidence: certain, preferred), so it had happened by that date. This is the same premise phase4 L6a and L4.5 rest on, stated at the precision the evidence actually supports rather than as a fabricated year. It replaces nothing: the 1900 placeholder row remains, lowered, as the record of what phase3b did. `bound` is never `preferred`, so this does not change what the event displays.
before 25 May 1972
bound
Why
The existing 1900-1999 circa/probable claim is left in place per append-only rule; its 1999 end is not achievable and this bound supersedes it in practice.
Reasoning
Neville recounts the furniture story in the past tense as something already resolved ('she agreed she would do it... got it back within the week'), so it necessarily happened before he told it on 1972-05-25. This bound is logically certain regardless of how vague 'many years ago' is, and it also corrects the existing circa range's upper end of 1999, which falls after both the telling and Neville's own death (hist_event 991, 1972-10-01) and cannot be right.
Sources
Source
- God And I Are One ¶50 (She came to see me. I said, all right, you’re seated there and I’m seated here in my apartment. Now you are not seated in my apartment. You are seated right now, close your eyes, you are seated in your own apartment.)