La Folie Pastre La Comtesse, la musique et la guerre by Olivier Bellamy

 La Folie Pastre

La Comtesse, la musique et la guerre by Olivier Bellamy is a new interesting book released by Grasset.

She was an eccentric lady, in love for music, theater, culture, creative people and in perennial research of an idealistic world where just beauty, music, theather, life and happiness had to go on. She was la Folie Pastré. A part of her  epitaph in fact: "Tout sa vie ne fu q'un scandale...C'est fou!..."

Lily Pastrè was this one and much more. Born in a rich family in the city of Marseille, she studied piano and violin with great passion. That music and creativity would have been a big and essential part of her existence it was visible also when pretty young; anti-conformist, she loved to be free and to stay free; she didn't never become a composer; Lily loved, viscerally loved art and the entire creative world but more as a privileged spectator. When she lost at war her beloved brother Lily found a good refugee only in music. She lived thar experience in fact in all its powerful devastation and sadness.

Although a free spirit, she married Jean Pastré, a rich member of a family famous for being merchants, bankers in love for good wine as well.

She has had three children but Lily has never manifested maternal spirit and she didn't falsify this part of her character. She was who she was in the good and in the bad.

Once, betrayed by her beloved Jean Pastré, she lived a profound crisis: how could she sort out that moments in which every possible thoughts decended upon her?

Once in Paris she assisted at a show and she remembered: her love for art, music. But...Where to go for a re-birth?

The beloved villa Provencale de Montredon where she had spent many happy moments.

In this place, a dreaming house, beautiful, suggestive, (she is closed to the public but opened to the artists) during the last second world war she loved to give hospitality at a molteplicty of talents: they were the most known ones:  her role was not just the one of having close to her good creatives: she also helped many talented Jewish men and women, giving to them a refugee, a place where to staying, as in the case of Clara the pianist, just for an example. She met along her way mr Fry, an American who denounced the conditions lived by many Jewish in Europe; this man became an activist and helped a lot of famous Jewish preparing to them false documents and saving their existences. The USA didn't maybe understand a lot what mr Fry did, because once returned in his country, he was a member of the FBI, he was fired and continued to live giving lessons to some students.

Lily ate and smoked a lot, she went to bed at the most eccentric hours,  but her friends to her made the difference and meant living like suspended in a time where there was only a beautiful world. 

This Villa was so dreaming that like in a fairy-tale, nothing or no one could break that beautiful dream. So, in a year like the 1942 Lily organized in gran stile a big  show: Le Songe d'une nuit d'été by Shakespeare. She would have wanted to try with an italian comedy but to her Shakespeare had an intensity more close to the one she was searching for her show at that time.

It was a big success and curiosity: a viewer was also a Nazis.

No sure why, while I was reading the biography of Lily I thought that under many ways, for sure distantly, she had some traits of Marie Antoinette and Peggy Guggenheim. Why? Because all of them lived the desire of an escapism: an escapism in a different utopistic land at the constant research of a beautiful world, that passeed through art, through theater, music, beautiful houses, trying to avoid constantly sufferance, and giving where possible joy and happiness to everyone.

She was a savior, Lily, because thanks to her being there, many artists, from Jewish origins saved their existence. Brava!

A beautiful book by Grasset, highly recommended.

I thank Editions Grasset for the physical copy of the book.

Anna Maria Polidori