The danger is that La Cuisine retrouvée will unwittingly throw us into depression the day we fail to find the right ingredients for a Proustian chocolate mousse or green bean salad, and are forced to eat a hamburger—which Proust never had a chance to write about.
It wouldn’t, of course, have been Marcel’s intention: a picture’s beauty does not depend on the things portrayed in it.
SYMPTOM NO. 5:
THAT WE ARE TEMPTED TO VISIT ILLIERS-COMBRAY
Traveling by car southwest of the cathedral town of Chartres, the view through the windshield is of a familiar northern European arable landscape. One could be anywhere, the only feature of note being a flatness to the earth which lends disproportionate significance to the occasional water tower or agricultural silo asserting itself on the horizon above the windshield wipers. The monotony is a welcome break from the effort of looking at interesting things, a time to rearrange the twisted accordion-shaped Michelin map before reaching the châteaux of the Loire, or to digest the sight of Chartres Cathedral with its clawlike flying buttresses and weather-worn bell towers. The smaller roads cut through villages whose houses are shuttered for a siesta that appears to last all day; even the petrol stations show no sign of life, their Elf flags flapping in a wind blowing in from across vast wheat fields. A Citroën makes an occasional hasty appearance in the rearview mirror, then overtakes with exaggerated impatience, as if speed were the only way to protest against the desperate monotony.
At the larger junctions, sitting innocuously among signs vainly asserting a speed limit of 90 and pointing the way to Tours and Le Mans, the motorist may notice a metal arrow indicating the distance to the small town of Illiers-Combray. For centuries, the sign pointed simply to Illiers, but in 1971 the town chose to let even the least cultured motorist know of its connection to its most famous son, or rather visitor. For it was here that Proust spent his summers from the age of six until nine and once again at the age of fifteen, in the house of his father’s sister, Élisabeth Amiot—and here that he drew inspiration for the creation of his fictional Combray.
There is something eerie about driving into a town that has surrendered part of its claim to independent reality in favor of a role fashioned for it by a novelist who once spent a few summers there as a boy in the late nineteenth century. But Illiers-Combray appears to relish the idea. In a corner of the rue du Docteur Proust, the patisserie-confiserie hangs a large, somewhat misleading sign outside its door:
T
HE HOUSE WHERE
A
UNT
L
ÉONIE USED TO BUY HER MADELEINES
Competition is fierce with the boulangerie in the Place du Marché, for it too is involved in the “fabrication de la petite madeleine de Marcel Proust.” A packet of eight can be had for twenty francs, twelve for thirty. The boulangère—who hasn’t read it—knows that the shop would have had to close long ago had it not been for In Search of Lost Time, which draws customers from around the world. They can be seen with cameras and madeleine bags, heading for the house of Tante Amiot, an undistinguished, rather somber edifice that would be unlikely to detain one’s attention were it not for the fact that within its walls young Proust once collected impressions used to build the narrator’s bedroom, the kitchen where Françoise prepared lunch, and the garden gate through which Swann came for dinner.
Inside, there is the hushed, semi-religious feel reminiscent of a church. Children grow quiet and expectant; the guide gives them a warm if pitying smile, while their mothers remind them to touch nothing along the way. There turns out to be little temptation. The rooms re-create in its full aesthetic horror the feel of a tastelessly furnished, provincial bourgeois nineteenth-century home. Inside a giant Perspex display cabinet on top of a table next to “Tante Léonie’s bed,” the curators have placed a white teacup, an ancient bottle of Vichy water, and a solitary, curiously oily-looking madeleine, which on closer inspection reveals itself to be made of plastic.
According to Monsieur Larcher, the author of a leaflet on sale at the tourist office:
If one wishes to grasp the deep and occult sense of In Search of Lost Time, one must, before starting to read it, devote an entire day to visiting Illiers-Combray. The magic of Combray can really only be experienced in this privileged place
.
Though Larcher displays admirable civic feeling and would no doubt be applauded by every patissier involved in the madeleine trade, one wonders after just such a day whether he is not at risk of exaggerating the qualities of his town and unwittingly diminishing those of Proust.
More honest visitors will admit to themselves that there is nothing striking about the town. It looks much like any other, which doesn’t mean it is uninteresting, simply that there is no obvious evidence of the privileged status that Monsieur Larcher accords it. It is a fitting Proustian point: the interest of a town is necessarily dependent on a certain way of looking at it. Combray may be pleasant, but it is as valuable a place to visit as any in the large plateau of northern France. The beauty that Proust revealed there could be present, latent, in almost any town, if only we made the effort to consider it in a Proustian way.
Ironically, however, it is out of an idolatrous reverence for Proust, and a misunderstanding of his aesthetic ideas, that we speed blindly through the surrounding countryside, through neighboring nonliterary towns and villages like Brou, Bonneval, and Courville, on our way to the imagined delights of Proust’s childhood locale. In so doing, we forget that had Proust’s family settled in Courville, or his old aunt taken up residence in Bonneval, it would have been to these places that we would have driven, just as unfairly. Our pilgrimage is idolatrous because it privileges the place Proust happened to grow up in rather than his manner of considering it, an oversight that the corpulent Michelin man encourages because he fails to recognize that the worth of sights is dependent more on the quality of one’s vision than on the object viewed, that there is nothing inherently three-star about a town Proust grew up in or inherently no-star about an Elf petrol station near Courville where Proust never had a chance to fill his Renault—but where if he had, he might easily have found something to appreciate, for it has a delightful forecourt with daffodils planted in a neat border and an old-fashioned pump that, from a distance, looks like a stout man leaning against a fence wearing a pair of burgundy dungarees.
In the preface to his translation of Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies, Proust had written enough to turn the Illiers-Combray tourist industry into an absurdity had anyone bothered to listen:
We would like to go and see the field that Millet … shows us in his Springtime, we would like M. Claude Monet to take us to Giverny, on the banks of the Seine, to