A Night at Évelyne Bloch-Dano’s Villa du Temps retrouvé

Évelyne Bloch-Dano enjoys a good night’s sleep. If she has agreed to spend a few hours as a sleepwalker on a camp bed, it is because this biographer of so many women’s lives – from George Sand to the young girls in bloom in Marcel Proust’s works – is about to embark on a unique experience: spending the night at the Villa du Temps retrouvé.

In the hushed silence of the sleeping museum, surrounded by portraits of women who held salons or paved the way for feminism and sexual liberation—from Rosa Bonheur to Winnaretta Singer, from the Countess Greffulhe to Sarah Bernhardt—the author summons their ghosts, blending them with her own memories.

A recollection of fleeting moments, of an eternal present that has faded: Le parfum des années is a thread stretched between the ephemeral and the eternal, between fleeting happiness and the desire to capture it forever.