Curiously, no museum had ever shown the Paris of Marcel Proust… “A Parisian novel” happily takes up this challenge. It is a pleasure to walk, from real life to literature, a journey punctuated by works and documents judiciously taken out, for a third of them, from the reserves of Carnavalet. “Proust did not like having his work explained by biography, which is moreover the subject of his essay ‘Against Sainte-Beuve’, but it was necessary to make people understand that it is from these ferments of reality that he offers, through his writing, a poetic vision of these universes”, explains Anne-Laure Sol, curator of the exhibition.
Paintings, photographs, films and documents allow us to imagine the existence of a student at Lycée Condorcet, born in 1871 to a doctor father and a mother of Jewish origin, a music lover and adored. We discover his successive addresses, up to the plans of certain apartments, from Auteuil to Saint-Augustin, the forget-me-nots in front of the marvelous studio of Jacques-Émile Blanche, the painter and the friend, the great gallery of the Louvre sketched by Whistler, the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, whose gardens were, for the young Marcel, the scene of children’s games and brutal scenes of life. “Haven’t you met a woman who touched a flower?” asks Céleste Albaret, the servant worried about her master’s asthma, to Jean Cocteau who comes to visit her. A gallery of portraits full of fantasy takes shape: Boni de Castellane, Robert de Montesquiou or Simone de Caillavet, awakened one evening of childhood to come and greet the master in the living room at the stroke of 11 o’clock. A whole Paris of suppliers and pleasures also appears: Prunier oysters, Poiré-Blanche ice cream, the Ritz grill-room, but also the brothel for men in the rue de l’Arcade, or the Ballets Russes, frequented by Picasso.
Also read.Marcel Proust: time regained
Proust’s bedroom, which the museum keeps, is the origin of the exhibition. This is where Marcel puts the word “end” to his story, where he breathes his last. The exhibition then slides with finesse towards the Paris of the novel, its “imaginary suburbs” and its characters invented by the author. Bertrand de Salignac-Fénelon gives way to Robert de Saint-Loup, and the Countess Greffulhe to Oriane de Guermantes. We imagine the Vinteuil sonata played in the music room of a painting by Jacques-Émile Blanche, the brush of the painter Elstir under that of Henri Le Sidaner. The Paris of Albertine and Charlus emerges through paintings by Henri Gervex and Jean Béraud. And the exhibition ends with an almost abstract canvas by Gustave Caillebotte: cobblestones reminiscent of those on which the narrator stumbles in spite of himself in the courtyard of the Hôtel de Guermantes and which, at the very end of “À la looking for lost time”, bring back memories like the little madeleine on the first pages.
Until April 10.
Any reproduction prohibited
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