PUBLIC TALK: Friends of the Library talk

The fashionable salons of 19th-century Paris, continuing the long tradition of such gatherings - broken temporarily only during Revolutionary times – opened their doors to a much wider membership than in the previous century. In so doing they became important centres in the artistic life of the city. This was particularly true in music as Paris gradually regained her position as the musical capital of Europe. Indeed, music so dominated Parisian life in the 1840s that one writer, Jules Janin, described it as ‘the great pleasure of this city, the great occupation of the drawing rooms which have banished politics and which have renounced literature, from ennui’! However any description of the 19th-century Parisian salons must also take into account the changing tastes in artistic life generally and the urban developments that were altering the face of Paris in that ebullient century. One of the most celebrated salons was that of Princess Mathilde Bonaparte, to whose home came Gautier, Flaubert, Balzac, Gounod, Saint-Saëns and many others, and – in later years – Proust.