ABSTRACT
The separation of the two worlds is already implied by the word 'royaume', which is resonant of fairy tale, of the oriental tales of the One Thousand and One Nights so dear to Proust, or the Old Testament or of Flaubert's novelistic depiction of the princess Salammbo, who lives in a secluded sphere inaccessible to most and visible only on her balcony. The Parnassians were a circle of mid-nineteenth-century poets whose most memorable motto was l'art pour l'art, and who in this quest drew inspiration from the literature of Graeco-Roman antiquity. In socio-historical terms, Proust's ekphrastic treatment of aristocratic patterns of behaviour, as well as names and wardrobe, records the perfected form and manners of an empire on the wane. The scope of the credibility of metamorphosis shrank with the onset of modernity, owing to such historical developments as the Enlightenment advances in scientific method and the philosophy of science, and of course, the naturalist and the realist novel.
