Caviar Kaspia

The history that links France and Russia is, as we know, eminently romantic. And it is at the dawn of the 18th century that it begins, when Pierre Le Grand, back from Versailles, marvelling at its splendour, gives his people the impetus they need for a light east wind to start blowing in our country. For if the adventurous tsar will be able to draw inspiration from what he observed during his visit, France will have gained in return, in addition to the friendship of a people, the progressive arrival of a first Russian diaspora, a beautiful ambassador of the Slavic soul. Artistic and elegant, spiritual – in every sense of the word – and beautifully whimsical, joyful and melancholic all at once. The translator and author Denis Fonvizine will find a poetic formula for his compatriots in voluntary exile at the time. “They change night into day,” he wrote in his Lettres de France in 1777. A promise kept throughout the following decades, during which, at the whim (and in spite of) the political ups and downs, the interest of Russian intellectuals and aristocrats in our country – the capital and the Riviera in the lead – never wavered. “The Russians then go to Paris as young people used to go to New York yesterday and today to Barcelona or Shanghai. “This is how author Alexander Jevakhoff explains it. At the beginning of the 20th century, a mixture of luxury, cultural exchanges and celebrations, the idyll has an air of ideal. In the wake of the “charming invasion” – in the words of Marcel Proust – of Diaghilev’s mythical Ballets Russes, which began to inflame the Théâtre du Châtelet in 1909 and revealed the Polish angel Nijinski, the poets’ muses like the iconic Petersburg poet Misia were already Slavic, and Paris found a new lease of life in this fascinating creative ferment.