Like the Adriana character in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, many of us must wonder what it would have been like to live at the height of the Belle Epoque in France during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Reading Le Lys Rouge is like stepping back in time just as Adriana did; we get to walk about the streets of Paris with the beautiful Thérèse Martin-Bellème who is always impeccably dressed and usually in the company of writers, sculptors or poets. Thérèse’s world is not only fashionably literary, it is also very political and we understand quite early on how fascinated Anatole France must have been with French history and politics. Since he was a journalist as well as a writer, the novel is sprinkled with both political and artistic digressions ranging from an assessment of Napoleon Bonaparte to a critique of the 1879 Grèvy government, touching on the miseries of military conscription, the reconstructions of national monuments, the inadequacies of the Catholic church and the wonders of the Renaissance in between. Sometimes these digressions work beautifully, at other times they disrupt the smooth flow of the novel and seem more like an afterthought. But perhaps it is the novel which is the afterthought and it is the political and artistic discussions which are the most important elements in Le Lys Rouge since there isn’t really much in the way of plot. There might have been a more sensational ending but France chooses a more realistic one instead. This is essentially a snapshot of a period and as such, it succeeds perfectly.
For any Proustians reading this, there are interesting links. The novel is set in much the same period as A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Anatole France is said to have been the model for the character Bergotte in Proust's work. Anatole France’s mistress had a literary salon which Proust attended and the character of the young writer Paul Vence in Le Lys Rouge resembles Proust himself. France’s mistress was famous for refusing to have any boring people attend her salon so she may be the model for Proust’s Mme Verdurin who had a similar rule for her salon. Like A la Recherche itself, this makes for a very interesting roman à clef.