Pastiches and mélanges
Pastiches et mélanges is a work by Marcel Proust published by NRF in 1919 . It appeared mainly in the Le Figaro newspaper from 1908 and was published in an anthology at the request of Gaston Gallimard .
Les pastiches
The book is a friend of the actor Walter Van Rensselaer Berry dedicated to an American-francophile lawyers, France against the government of the United States during World War I represented in court. The first part, the pastiche s, contains nine literary imitations. They all have the common theme "l'affaire Lemoine", the local news that was the focus of gossip from 1908–1909. A scammer named Lemoine was dying to know the secret of making diamonds . As a result of false experiences, he received the considerable sum of one million. At Werner's complaint, the guilty party was indicted in January 1908 and finally sentenced by a court in July 1909 to a six-year prison term. The nine imitations tell of the "l'affaire Lemoine" in the manner of Honoré de Balzac , Gustave Flaubert , Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve , Henri de Régnier , Jules Michelet , Émile Faguet and Ernest Renan . The collection closes with the imitation of memoranda for Saint-Simon , an author particularly admired by Proust. The majority of these texts appeared in the literary supplement to Figaros from 1908 onwards. “L'affaire Lemoine” inspired Proust to create other imitations that did not appear in this collection: one in the manner of Chateaubriand and Maeterlinck , and a second imitation of Sainte-Beuve.