Pierre Loti's urban estate in Rochefort: exoticism in literature and everyday life

Abstract

This article deals with the history of the urban estate of Pierre Loti in Rochefort, a writer whose name is inseparably linked to the history of exoticism in French literature. Its creation is an example of the fusion of architectural and literary intentions, like Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill, Walter Scott's Abbotsford and Alexandre Dumas' Le Château de Monte-Cristo. Unlike these authors, for Loti, the estate was a sublimation of what he felt he was unable to express in his work. The exotic decoration of the villa contributed to Loti's passion for life-making, turning his own life into a theatrical scaffolding. But also the fear of death, which had haunted Loti since his youth, the writer tried to overcome with the decoration of his villa, which allowed him to juxtapose the times. The article describes in detail one of the festivities Loti hosted in his own home, the Louis XI Dinner during which all the guests were dressed in costumes of the era and spoke Old French. Loti's experiment can be compared to the holidays that the descendants of the Marquis de Sade arranged at their Mediterranean villa. In a certain sense, they foreshadowed the aesthetic practice of the Surrealists and what later became known as events. Having dissolved his life in the mirror image of numerous exotic novels, Loti turned the villa into his true work, making it the embodiment of his own mythology, in which the exoticism of distant countries turned into the exoticism of distant centuries.