ABSTRACT
Known for his novels set in Turkey, Japan and Tahiti, among other far-flung lands, French novelist Pierre Loti’s taste for the medieval has been largely forgotten today, though his nineteenth-century contemporaries considered it as ‘exotic’ as his travel narratives. The press was particularly fascinated by Loti’s re-enactments of medieval festivities, notably the elaborate ‘Louis XI dinner’ he held in his fifteenth-century dining room in 1888, an attempt to return to the year 1470. 2 He designed every detail himself – from menus to costumes to entertainment – leading journalists to marvel at the ways in which this evening brought the Middle Ages back to life:
The local colour was so perfect, and so easily and so well did everyone speak Old French, says M. Adrien Marie, that one thought oneself in the century of Louis XI. […] The truth of the costumes accentuates the truth of the decor. It really is a bit of Old France that has been resuscitated in the mysterious vapour of the torches. 3
This enthusiasm for the past transported to the present, however, begs a question, that of whether it is, in fact, possible for someone without first-hand memories of the medieval past to ‘remember’ it well enough to resuscitate it or to appreciate it as ‘truthfully’ resuscitated. Can archaic language, costumes and decor bring the past back to life? Through study of Loti’s 1888 ‘Louis XI Dinner’, an event reported heavily in the French press, this essay will examine the ways in which Loti and his contemporaries negotiated this conundrum. Far from seeing a contradiction in the idea of bringing the Middle Ages back to life, Loti and his contemporaries considered ‘reliving’ the Middle Ages through performance as an important and legitimate way of ‘remembering’ it, both individually and collectively.