FRANCE: A la Recherche de Marcel Proust

On summer weekends, trains, cars and buses converge on the tiny (pop. 3,250) hamlet of Illiers, 73 miles southwest of Paris, and disgorge groups of tourists. Illiers is, in most respects, an unremarkable French village. One thing sets it apart—it was here that Marcel Proust whiled away the timeless summer days of his childhood. Later, he immortalized the town under the fictional name of Combray in his monumental novel, A la Recherche du Temps Perdu (Remembrance of Things Past). Relatively untouched by the modern age, as if it has been locked up for safekeeping against time in the pages of Proust’s books, the town renamed itself llliers-Combray this year to honor the author and the centennial of his birth on July 10.

Not all of the townsfolk are happy about Illiers’ status as the center of a Proust cult. Until quite recently, many scorned the author as a homosexual, atheistic, hypochondriac aesthete. Also a very difficult writer. Even Mayor René Compère, 67, a pert little man who takes visitors on a lecture tour around the town, has yet to crack the gigantic set of Proust’s works that is prominently displayed in his office. Compère argues that les Proustiens, as the literary-minded tourists are known, are not even good for business. Says the mayor: ‘They come from some place, eat a madeleine, see the Pré Catalan and go.”

Shell-Shaped Cakes. Certainly Combray forms only a small part of Proust’s re-created world, the decadent, disintegrating world of elegance and fashion that was fin de siécle Paris society. But it is a most enchanting part, and a necessary beginning.

The true literary pilgrim starts his visit at Mme. Benoist’s pátisserie on the Place du Marché, where he begins his evocation of the past by biting into the shell-shaped confection called a madeleine. Ten years ago, the bubbly Mme. Benoist sold only four madeleines a week. “In the past three weeks,” she says, “we’ve sold 1,000. We had to hire another apprentice.” Many of those who buy the little cakes (at 12¢ apiece) are foreigners, for Proust’s masterwork has been translated into 17 languages, including Finnish, Japanese and Serbo-Croatian. Mme. Benoist remarks: “If this keeps up, I’ll have to learn English, German, Italian, and whatever it is that the Japanese and Chinese both speak.”

Cultivated Hypochondria. It was the “petite madeleine,” dunked in tea and then savored, that unlocked the corridors of Proust’s memory. “No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate, than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place.” So in Swann’s Way, the first part of his seven-volume work, did Proust begin his remembrances. Soon the past was unfolding in his pages: “And once I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-flowers which my aunt used to give me . . . immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theater.”

The old gray house of his Aunt Elisabeth Amiot (called Tante Léonie in the novel) stands just two blocks from the pastry shop. On the second floor is the bedroom where she cultivated her hypochondria to the point of becoming a bedridden invalid for 20 years. Later, her nephew emulated her example: writing feverishly at night (he practically existed on café au lait), sleeping during the day (with the aid of veronal), Proust rarely left his bed in a cork-lined Paris room during the last 15 years of his life. On Aunt Elisabeth’s bedside table, gracing her tea saucer, is one of Mme. Benoist’s madeleines, carefully wrapped in plastic and replaced every few days.

Magic Lantern. It was in a tiny room across the hall that the author spent his boyhood holidays. “Far from my mother and grandmother, my bedroom became the fixed point on which my melancholy and anxious thoughts were centered. Someone had had the happy idea of giving me, to distract me on evenings when I seemed abnormally wretched, a magic lantern … it substituted for the opaqueness of my walls an impalpable iridescence, supernatural phenomena of many colours, in which legends were depicted, as on a shifting and transitory window.” The lantern is still there. So is the scrubby garden behind the house, with the little door whose tinkling gate bell announced visitors—and signaled that the young Proust was to be sent up to his bedroom to be kept out of the way. For the dedicated Proustian, the bell evokes the author’s agony.

A ten-minute walk from “Tante Léonie’s” across the Loir River (not to be confused with the Loire) takes the pilgrim to the Pré Catalan. The five-acre garden was created by Proust’s uncle, a cloth merchant in Illiers, as a replica of the area in Paris’ Bois du Bologne that bears the same name. The little lagoons, intricate patterns of shade trees, and the tiny lane lined with hawthorns (whose pink blossoms reminded Proust of his favorite dish, strawberries crushed in cream cheese) became Swann’s park, and it is there that the novel’s thinly fictionalized narrator (whom Proust named Marcel) meets his first love, Swann’s daughter Gilberte. The Pré Catalan is much the same today, except that one is not allowed to sprawl on the grass as Proust did.

Unhallowed Significance. Between the garden and the town, the tourist passes the ruins of the castle of Illiers, built in 1019 by Geoffroy D’llliers Vicomte de Châteaudun. British Biographer George D. Painter points out that one of the wrecked towers “had an unhallowed significance for Marcel: It could be seen from the lavatory where he would retire whenever he needed privacy to read, weep, or make his first experiments in the pleasures of sex—experiments which were not without their heroic side, since he was not sure at first that their rending delight would not be the death of him.”

To savor fully the Proustian experience in llliers-Combray, however, the pilgrim must meet a contemporary of the author’s, 90-year-old Philibert Louis Larcher. A retired Inspector General of National Education, Larcher has devoted the past 30 years to reminding the town of its Proustian heritage. Through his efforts, the Tante Léonie house was made a national monument and the Pré Catalan was preserved. He founded the Society of the Friends of Marcel Proust and the Friends of Combray. His monograph, The Essence of Combray, has been revised and reissued just in time to be snapped up by this year’s hordes of cultists. He gives hours-long lectures in the converted carriage house that is attached to the Tante Léonie house.

“My first job was to establish that IIliers was Combray,” remarks Larcher with a sly grin. “That wasn’t easy. When I first came here and people discovered what I was trying to do, they wanted to shoot me.” Even today, the town does relatively little to exploit the commercial possibilities of Proust’s name, apart from the Benoist patisserie with its madeleines. Actually, according to Larcher, Marcel’s madeleines came from another bakery, located a scant three doors from Tante Léonie’s garden gate. “But,” he sighs, “the owner doesn’t care about Proust.”