Culture + Lifestyle

Marcel Proust at Illiers-Combray

a temple of memory in the french countryside

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All great writers have an exceptionally fine-tuned sense of place, but none, surely, has ever been finer than Marcel Proust's. The architect of that sublime memory palace, In Search of Lost Time, is inseparable from his own décors, real and imagined: the cork-lined room where the invalid so famously wrote most of his masterpiece; the grand hotel by the sea where the sickly adolescent received his sentimental education; the salons and boudoirs of the fin de siècle, where the dilettante served his apprenticeships; the somber Right Bank apartment of his parents—an eminent doctor and a cultivated femme d'interieur, whose bed he bequeathed to a brothel—and not least, the family country house in the sandstone market town of Illiers, just southwest of Chartres, which he calls Combray, and where the most sensitive youth in literature spent the most idyllic and tormented hours of his childhood.

That house, its garden and furnishings, the village, its society and landscape, and all the sensations, experiences and revelations attached to them, are so much the nucleus of his great novel that one is somewhat shocked to learn that the young Marcel actually spent very little "lost time" there: two weeks a year at Easter between the ages of six and nine—when the onset of his asthma made the country a death trap for him —and a farewell visit at fifteen. One is also somewhat surprised at how diminutive the rooms are, and at how closely the extended family must have lived in them. But such is the power of a child's or an artist's memory to heighten, isolate and idealize.

While most of the places where Proust lived or sojourned have been razed or sold into anonymity, that cherished provincial dwelling, which belonged to his paternal uncle and aunt, was bequeathed by their granddaughter to the Society of the Friends of Marcel Proust, and it has been restored—as a temple should be—with consummate devotion.

Illiers, redesignated Illiers-Combray in 1971, was the birthplace of Proust's father, Dr. Adrien Proust, and of Adrien's sister, Elisabeth, who married a local notable named Jules Amiot. The Prousts were a family of humble shopkeepers. Amiot was a merchant of a grander class who dealt in, among other things, Algerian wines and had a fondness for Moorish mosaics, which he used to embellish his window surrounds, and for dressing in Arab costume, to the consternation of his neighbors. But he was also a passionate horticulturist who endowed the village with a deliciously eccentric public park of his own design, in the English neo-Gothic style, featuring a grotto, a waterfall, a dovecote, statuary, a lily pond, a serpentine river stocked with carp, romantic paths hedged with hawthorn and may, and plantings imported from its Parisian model and namesake, the Pré Catelan.

The Amiot house was built in 1818, with a half-timbered façade and two wings flanking a trellised courtyard, shaded by a now venerable chestnut tree. The kitchen, dining room, petit salon and salon rouge occupy the first floor. The staircase that Proust's narrator climbed every night to await, in anguish, the uncertain arrival of his mother for a goodnight kiss leads to the bedrooms. Marcel's tiny guest bedroom overlooked the garden, and he slept in a chaste Empire bed "placed as in the depths of a sanctuary" and swagged with "high white curtains." There, too, as he describes it, is that magic lantern of milky porcelain, provided by his parents to distract him from his solitude and impatience, and through which he projected the life of Geneviève de Brabant, depicted in hand-painted slides, while grasping, for the first time, "the color of words."

The Marcel Proust Museum is also known as "Aunt Léonie's House," after the personage in his novel, although Elisabeth Proust Amiot was, unlike her model, neither bedridden nor a widow. Her mustachioed husband in his Zouave pantaloons was an imposing and fanciful presence during Proust's boyhood. An amateur painter, he worked in a studio attached to the house that he had decorated with the rugs, carvings and souvenirs of his North African travels. When the family had retired to bed and the maid had cleared the liqueur glasses, plates of petits fours and embroidery threads from the card table in the petit salon, Jules Amiot returned to this Oriental salon to grade his wines at an Empire desk and to smoke his hookah. By day, the sunlight streaming through the stained-glass window casts a diamond pattern—the illusion of an Islamic mosaic—on the well-waxed floor.

There was nothing so exotic about the formal, though not much larger, salon rouge down the hall, which radiates bourgeois decorum. The walls are hung in red damask, and the stiff Louis Philippe armchairs and sofa invite one to perch rather than to nestle. These furnishings, and a pedestal table with gilt legs, come from the fumoir, or smoking room, of the Prousts' apartment on the rue de Courcelles, where Marcel lived with his mother until her death; she had inherited these pieces from her own prosperous Jewish parents, the bankers Weil. The curators of the museum have enriched the décor with other mementos of Mme Proust: a fan with her maiden initials, "J. W."; her music table; and a portrait, painted in 1880, the year Marcel turned nine, by Anaïs Beauvais. Proust lamented "its vague resemblance, which only became apparent once Maman had been so incredibly rejuvenated by death," and which, he wrote, was "extremely painful to me." His own dandyish, chalk-faced likeness, propped on an easel, is a copy of a portrait by his friend Jacques-Emile Blanche, of which he was especially fond. The original hangs in the Musée d'Orsay.

When the young Proust came home, early, from a walk in the Pré Catelan— having left his hardier relatives to continue without him—he was in the habit of waiting for lunch, however remote that event might yet be, in the dining room. By night, the glow of the brass-and-milk-glass chandelier burnished the Empire paneling. At midday, "the white noon sunlight" glazed the "brilliantly armed" table. Marcel's "only companions," he wrote, "and they were very respectful of my reading, were the painted plates hanging from the wall, the calendar, with yesterday's page freshly ripped off, the clock and the fire, which spoke without demanding a response."

By the time the fifteenth-century church bells of Saint-Jacques (Proust's "Saint-Hilaire") were striking twelve, the house was redolent with the aromas of a four- or five-course provincial déjeuner prepared by the incomparable family cook, Ernestine. In the novel, Aunt Léonie's incomparable cook, Françoise (it is she, presumably, who bakes the madeleine), figures as a goddess of nature, and her kitchen is a chapel where Marcel, enthralled by all mysteries of creation, worships humbly.

The actual kitchen of the Proust house is a narrow galley with a terra-cotta floor and windows on its long side, facing the garden. An adjoining pantry housed the formidable batterie de cuisine as he evokes it: "stewpots, casseroles, fish kettles, terrines, pastry molds, and a complete collection of copper cookwear in every possible dimension." The tiles of the open fireplace are periwinkle blue. The stove and the cast-iron ovens were stoked with wood. A worktable of raw pine holds a little café filtre pot made from brown pottery and a majolica butter dish, poignantly ordinary but transformed, by the depth and grandeur of Proust's feeling for language, into the tools of an initiation ceremony. Françoise conjured up her chefs d'oeuvre from prosaic ingredients, and Proust compares her beef in aspic to a sculpture by Michelangelo—the cubes of jelly glistening like chunks of quartz. He also associates her art with his own: the ensemble of his sentences brought to perfection like the ensemble of her flavors—with fire, patience and virtuosity.

On a recent summer afternoon close to Proust's birthday, July 10, the tour of Aunt Léonie's house and garden was conducted by the erudite Anne Borrel, a director of the museum. As she led her group from room to room, quoting, by heart, from In Search of Lost Time, her recitation served as a reminder that this museum is just the most solid and public of Proust's temples, and that there are others—as passionately tended—in the memory of his readers.