Pierre loti’s ‘memories’ of the middle ages: Feasting on the gothic in 1888

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.