THE FIRST DAYS OF SEPTEMBER 1870 were among the most calamitous in French history. In the town of Sedan, on the Meuse River near the Belgian border, Emperor Napoléon III and his troops found themselves surrounded by an invading Prussian army that overwhelmed the French with heavy shelling. Cut off from reinforcements, the emperor, whom Victor Hugo had dubbed Napoléon le Petit, gave the order to raise the white flag. The victorious Prussians demanded unconditional surrender. The capitulation agreement was signed by the French on Friday, September 2.
In Paris the next day, as news of the swift, humiliating defeat at Sedan spread throughout the capital, Dr. Adrien Proust, a middle-aged Catholic bachelor, a grocer’s son originally from the small provincial town of Illiers, married Jeanne Weil, the daughter of a wealthy Parisian Jewish family. At twenty-one, the beautiful, darkhaired woman was fifteen years younger than the bridegroom. No one knows how Adrien and Jeanne met, but it is likely that they were introduced at a government-sponsored event or social gathering. Adrien had recently risen to the top ranks in public health administration, and Jeanne’s family had many connections in official circles.
The wedding ceremony took place in the town hall of the city’s tenth arrondissement, where the Weils lived and where Jeanne’s father, Nathé, oversaw his successful business ventures. Nathé’s father had made his fortune as a porcelain manufacturer, wealth that Nathé increased as a stockbroker. Jeanne’s dowry was an impressive trousseau and two hundred thousand gold francs, a considerable fortune in any era. The bride’s witnesses were her twenty-two-year-old brother Georges Weil, an attorney, and her great-uncle Adolphe Crémieux, an important political leader soon to join the frantic efforts to form a new government and defend Paris against the advancing Prussians. The following day, Crémieux accepted the appointment of Minister of Justice in the Government of National Defense. The groom’s witness was Dr. Gustave Cabanellas, a distinguished physician and member of the Légion d’honneur. The union was a brilliant one for the provincial shopkeeper’s son, proof of the new social status Adrien enjoyed as a scientist with excellent prospects for a stellar career. As a public health official, Dr. Proust’s income was in the high range of ten thousand to twenty thousand francs a year.1
Everyone agreed that the bride and groom made a handsome couple. Each had strong, regular features and a clear, steady gaze. Jeanne seemed serene, her beauty contemplative, her natural mirth and quick wit subdued by the solemnity of the occasion and the looming national crisis. Perhaps her most striking feature was her large, almond-shaped eyes, eyes with heavy lids that gave her a slightly Oriental look. She usually wore her beautiful dark hair pulled up or braided. Being fairly tall for a woman, she carried her tendency toward plumpness well; her heaviness later became more marked and aggravated her health problems. Adrien was a fine-looking man with an air of quiet authority and confidence. Not yet needing glasses, his eyes had the clear look of a pioneering intellectual, but one who had maintained his provincial common sense, a seeker of knowledge and practical solutions. He, too, had fine black hair, though the line had begun to recede slightly above the temples; his beard and mustache were already flecked with strands of gray.
Jeanne Weil was a sensitive, exceptionally intelligent, and well-educated young woman who had a profound appreciation of music and literature. Her schooling had been primarily classical. Because girls could not attend the lycées that functioned as preparatory schools for higher education, Jeanne studied at home, and probably also with private tutors. In addition to Latin and Greek, she learned to read and speak English and some German. She was a passionate admirer of the great French masters of the seventeenth century whose works formed the central element of her education: the plays of Molière, Racine, and Corneille, as well as the letters of Mme de Sévigné. From these and other beloved books that Jeanne read and reread, she used to copy out in a notebook, writing in a fine, slanted hand, her favorite passages, committing many of them to memory.2 As befitted her modesty, she did so in secret. Her letters contain many literary allusions, and she quotes at ease not only from French classical writers and William Shakespeare but also from such modern novelists as Honoré de Balzac and Pierre Loti.3 An accomplished pianist like her mother, she often played the works of Mozart and Beethoven for her family and friends. Those who knew her well delighted in her company, enjoying her subtle sense of humor fed by a strong sense of the ridiculous. With all her accomplishments and her fine mind, Jeanne was reserved, preferring simplicity to ostentation, natural dignity to any display of vanity.
Both her parents were descended from wealthy families who had made their fortunes in manufacturing and trade. The Berncastels and the Weils were powerful and rich members of the Jewish haute bourgeoisie of Paris, with many links to legal, financial, and political figures. Home for the Weils was a large six-room apartment at 40 bis rue du Faubourg-Poissonnière, in a neighborhood of stockbrokers and businessmen. This area also comprised the theater and opera district, an ideal location for a financier whose family loved plays and music.4 Nathé Weil was a conservative who under the reign of Louis-Philippe had joined the National Guard. Nathé often scandalized his family by his avarice. At meals, he served mediocre wines to others while keeping a bottle of a better vintage well chilled at his feet for his own delectation.5
Jeanne resembled her mother, born Adèle Berncastel in 1824, an attractive, highly educated woman. Like many prominent Jewish families in France, the Berncastels had adopted the comte de Saint-Simon’s recommendations for the education of women. The girls received a strong background in languages, literature, art, and music so that they could carry on the tradition of the brilliant salons of the Age of Enlightenment. With this in mind, Adèle’s mother had sent her regularly to the salon of her aunt Amélie, whose husband, Adolphe Crémieux, had agreed to find the time in his busy political and social agenda to be her tutor. She could not have chosen a better mentor, for Adolphe was one of the outstanding statesmen of his era. An ardent republican, leader of the radical left and the Jewish community, Crémieux had been elected since 1842 to the Chamber of Deputies in various governments and had served as minister of justice in the provisional government of 1848. On October 24, 1870, less than two months after Jeanne’s wedding, he signed the decree that bears his name, granting French citizenship to Algerian Jews. Crémieux was an enlightened political leader whose efforts led to the abolition of slavery in the French colonies and of the death penalty for political crimes.6
In the Crémieux salon, Adèle met some of the era’s most distinguished writers and composers: Alphonse de Lamartine, Alfred de Musset, Gioacchino Rossini, Victor Hugo, George Sand—whose novels she loved—and Fromenthal Halévy, whose daughter Geneviève Bizet and grandson Jacques Bizet were to be closely associated with Proust. But above all other literary works, Adèle loved those of the seventeenth century, especially the Mémoires of the duc de Saint-Simon and the letters of Mme de Sévigné. To Marcel, his grandmother Adèle always seemed “more Sévigné than Sévigné herself.” Witty, intelligent Mme de Sévigné (1629–96), whose letters are among the most famous in French literature, chronicled the entertainments and scandals at the world’s most brilliant court, that of Louis XIV, the Sun King. Her letters also reveal her passionate devotion to her daughter, from whom she was separated for long periods of time. Adèle passed her admiration of Sévigné on to Jeanne and Marcel. For Proust, the marquise became a major literary inspiration for her way of narrating, as a chronicler of her epoch, and as a model of motherly devotion. In his novel, Proust endowed the Narrator’s grandmother with the same love for Sévigné’s letters.7
In addition to the artists Adèle encountered in her aunt’s salon, she met prominent politicians and social reformers. Adèle and her aunt were invited to other salons, whose leaders they in turn entertained. The young woman quickly lost any sense of insecurity, feeling just as much at home in Comtesse d’Haussonville’s liberal salon as among the more conservative guests who gathered around Princesse Mathilde, niece of Napoléon I and longtime salon hostess, whom Proust knew in the final decade of her life. By the time of her marriage, Adèle was a well-educated, gentle, and self-sacrificing woman, in many ways the opposite of her eccentric husband, Nathé. Her daughter Jeanne took after her in both temperament and taste.
What had Jeanne, the product of this milieu, thought of Adrien Proust when they first met? Intelligent, well brought up, and polite he certainly was, but he knew next to nothing about literature and music. What kind of life would she have with him? She must have sensed that he was a good man, solid, reliable, someone who might well become endearing. Being in love was not the most important consideration in the decision to marry. The most one could hope for was that love would follow marriage and last for a lifetime. This seems to have been true for Jeanne and Adrien. Proust later wrote about middle-class marriages in Jean Santeuil: “A lovematch, that is to say a marriage based on love, would have been considered as a proof of vice. Love was something that came after marriage and lasted until death. No woman ever stopped loving her husband any more than she would have stopped loving her mother.” Proust looked approvingly on “this couple whose union was not a matter of free choice, but the result of middle-class conventions and respectable notions, but who, for all that, will remain together until death breaks the bond.”8
Mixed marriages, although rare under the Second Empire, occurred more frequently in wealthy Jewish families. The Weils accepted such a union for their daughter more readily because they did not observe the Sabbath or keep a kosher house. They went to temple only on major religious days, such as Yom Kippur.9 As was customary in such marriages, Jeanne agreed to raise the children as Catholics. Out of respect for her parents, she refused to convert to Catholicism.
All evidence suggests that Adrien and Jeanne were devoted to each other. During their marriage, he had brief, discreet affairs with courtesans, actresses, and singers, without causing any apparent harm to his relationship with Jeanne. According to the mores of the time, virile men of the middle class were expected to indulge in such escapades. No one knows what Jeanne thought about her future husband when they met, but she and her parents must have believed in the prospects of this gentile doctor, just in his prime, who had arrived from nowhere and ascended in record time to the first rank of young scientists.
The Proust family, one of the oldest in the small town of Illiers, near Chartres, can be traced back as far as the sixteenth century. Adrien’s ancestors, for the most part, belonged to the middle class and held administrative posts that, under the ancien régime, were normally reserved for notables. The records list Prousts who were bailiffs, elected representatives, and lawyers. In 1589 Jehan Proust was listed as a member of the Assembly of Notables, a civic institution dating from the Middle Ages. In 1621, when Louis XIII was king, Gilles Proust purchased the office of bailiff that passed down to his descendants, some of whom are buried in the church of Saint-Jacques in Illiers. With his new office Gilles became exempted from the poll tax paid by serfs and commoners and rose to the ranks of the upper bourgeoisie. In August 1633 Gilles’s brother Robert was appointed tax collector, thereby assuming the annual obligations of supplying the marquis d’llliers with the sum of 10,500 francs minted at Tours and of providing a candle at Candlemas for the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Chartres. Adrien’s other ancestors remained in the lower middle class as merchants or farmers.
Adrien’s father, François-Valentin Proust, was born in 1801, the youngest of seven children.10 The family lived in the rue du Cheval-Blanc in an ancient house whose entrance had a low Romanesque arch and sandstone steps. When François-Valentin was in his mid-twenties, he married Catherine-Virginie Torcheux from the nearby village of Cernay. The couple established a general store at number 11, place du Marché, opposite the church of Saint-Jacques. There they earned their living by selling a variety of items, including honey, a chocolate touted as being good for your health, spices, cotton, pottery, hardware, spirits and liqueurs, and candles made from their own supply of wax.11
Their first child, Louise Virginie, born in 1826, died when she was only six. In 1828 Virginie gave birth to another girl, Françoise-Élisabeth-Joséphine Proust. Six years passed before their last child was born; on March 18, 1834, François-Valentin and Virginie became the parents of a son, Achille Adrien Proust.
As a child, Adrien was healthy and intelligent, a good boy endowed with an insatiable curiosity about his surroundings and a passion for learning. When he finished elementary school, the family decided that the serious, hardworking pupil should prepare for the priesthood by attending the seminary at the Collège impérial de Chartres, where he had won a scholarship. At the seminary he continued to be an excellent student. In 1853 he received his bachelor’s degrees in literature and science and passed brilliantly the examination for his certificate of aptitude in the physical sciences. Despite the many greater awards and honorific titles that were later his, he always remained proud that the name Adrien Proust was engraved on the honor roll in the parlor of the old college in Chartres.12
After graduation Adrien declared himself free to follow his new calling, science; against his father’s wishes, he abandoned the priesthood for medicine. To pursue his career he went to Paris and enrolled at the School of Medicine, becoming the first of his family to leave Illiers and seek his fortune in the big city. Unknown and entirely on his own, he succeeded through hard work and concentration, advancing rapidly through the medical ranks until he occupied a position in the vanguard.
Adrien sensed that a new era was dawning. He ceased practicing his religion as he was drawn, like so many of his generation, to the great movement of scientific exploration. He determined to be part of the revolution in science that was taking place in the laboratories and amphitheaters across Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century. In France the founders of this new age were men who taught natural and physical sciences and stressed the importance of empirical experimentation. Such pioneers as Philippe Pinel had created new fields of study based on observation and experimentation rather than ignorance and superstition. Pinel’s work with the insane, carried on for the most part during the turbulent times of the French Revolution and early Empire, had shown that mental illness was the result not of demons but of physiological and psychological problems. His observations and studies laid the foundation for the establishment of psychiatry as a field of medicine, demonstrating that the methods of observation used in other sciences were also applicable to the healing arts. Marie-François-Xavier Bichat’s anatomical research led to the creation of histology, the microscopic study of the structure of human tissues. Bichat was the first to simplify anatomy and physiology by reducing the complex structures of organs to their elementary tissues. These and other revolutionary discoveries influenced Adrien’s research and methods.
When his father died in Illiers on October 2, 1855, Adrien, though only twentyone, had been studying medicine for two years. Death had robbed Adrien of the chance to prove to his father that he could become a distinguished physician. After attending his father’s funeral, Adrien returned to Paris, where he excelled, winning prizes at the School of Medicine for his hospital work and claiming top honors as a resident. His career advanced rapidly. In 1862 Adrien defended his thesis on “Idiopathic Pneumothorax” and received his medical degree. The following year he was named chief of clinic after another competitive state examination. From 1863 to 1866, he practiced medicine and continued his advanced studies. In 1866 he defended his doctoral thesis, “Différentes formes de ramollissement du cerveau” (Different types of softening of the brain), passing with honorable mention the concours d’agrégation, a competitive state examination for teaching posts that qualified him to teach in the School of Medicine.
It was during the cholera epidemic of 1866, while chief of clinic at the Hôpital de la Charité, that Adrien began the work that eventually brought him international fame. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Asiatic cholera had not spread far beyond India, but with the rapid expansion of trade between Asia and Europe, epidemics of the disease began to reach France and soon grew more frequent. In 1832, two years before Adrien was born, cholera killed 154 of Illiers’s citizens and more than 100,000 people in France.13 Another epidemic swept the country in 1849, carrying away more than 300,000 French souls. Although earlier plagues of cholera had ravaged France, the great epidemic of 1866, with a fatality rate of 50 percent, plunged the entire nation into mourning.14
Cholera, a severe infectious disease prevalent in warm regions where filth and poor sanitary conditions are found, is spread by contact with fecally contaminated food and water. After a short incubation period of only two or three days the victim begins to suffer terrible diarrhea and nausea leading to extreme dehydration. In the severe 1866 epidemic, Dr. Proust spent long hours at a stretch without rest, caring for his patients at great personal risk. Yet despite having taken all possible measures to save them, he could only stand by and watch helplessly as their conditions worsened. As dehydration reached a critical stage, the victims suffered horrible muscle cramps, the eyes became sunken, the cheeks hollow, the voice hoarse, and blood pressure dropped. Death quickly followed. Adrien understood that given the magnitude of the disease, individual treatment could never defeat cholera. The solution lay in prevention.
In spite of the vigilance of scientists, the plague of 1866 had spread by following a new, more rapid route from India to Suez and into Europe. Adrien, in addition to his responsibilities as a public health official, belonged to a group of young scientists who were studying hygiene and epidemiology under Doctors Tardieu and Fauvel. Like Fauvel, who conceived the idea of a cordon sanitaire, Adrien was convinced that the only way to prevent plagues was to define and implement principles of international hygiene. A cordon sanitaire would establish a boundary line of nations cooperating to enforce a strict system of quarantine for ships entering their waters. In his clinic, Dr. Proust began to test this idea, with excellent results, by isolating patients sick with cholera. Other doctors and scientists noticed his tireless efforts to combat the disease and his disregard of danger. Although it was nearly twenty years before the German bacteriologist Robert Koch isolated the bacillus that causes cholera, Adrien knew that such an agent must exist. If his theory about how cholera moved westward from India was correct, the deadly epidemics could be halted by creating a cordon sanitaire on Europe’s eastern flank. In order to implement such a plan, he must first determine the routes by which the disease spread. Foreseeing the importance of an organized effort among nations to improve world health, he undertook a campaign to persuade political figures of the Second Empire to support his plan.
After the International Health Conference in Vienna in 1869, the minister of agriculture and commerce sent Dr. Proust to Russia and Persia on a mission to learn the routes by which cholera had arrived from Russia in the most recent epidemics. He would travel first to Astrakhan in Russia, then on to Persia, tracing the route followed by the epidemic of 1832. Then, for the return to Paris, he would take a southerly route: Mecca, Turkey, and Egypt, following the path taken by the 1849 and 1866 epidemics.
Adrien’s voyage began under excellent conditions in the summer of 1869, when he boarded a car of the new Northern Railway bound for Moscow. The train, a model of nineteenth-century mass-transit technology, combined speed and comfort, and the service on board was superb, provided by an astonishingly large number of valets and waiters. But when Dr. Proust continued the journey from Moscow, conditions immediately became more primitive. He left the Russian capital in a wooden carriage known as a kibitka, a contraption that, as Balzac had remarked decades earlier when visiting Russia, “makes one feel in every bone the tiniest bump in the road.”15 Adrien had to endure jarring potholes in the road as he traveled in withering heat all the way to Saint Petersburg and on to Astrakhan. These hardships tested his physical stamina and courage but did not deter the determined doctor, more thankful than ever for his robust constitution.
To continue across the Caucasus Mountains and the high plateaus of Persia, Adrien mounted horses and eventually camels when he joined a caravan following the ancient routes across the desert. During this adventuresome trip, Dr. Proust lived and ate like the natives, whom he never tired of observing. Along the way he took notes, often while rocking in the saddle, learning as much as he could about customs and hygiene among the Persians. Reaching Teheran, he found himself, for the first time in weeks, in opulent surroundings when he was received by the shah of Persia and his minister of foreign affairs, who presented the brave physician with sumptuous carpets. The Persian officials were curious about the scientific nature of the doctor’s voyage and hoped that their country would also benefit from his efforts to find relief from cholera. In Mecca, Adrien was appalled by the crush of pilgrims in the holy city to which each Muslim must make at least one pilgrimage before he dies. He watched as multitudes arrived and departed, living throughout their stay in the most primitive sanitary conditions, a sight that reinforced his convictions about how diseases spread. He journeyed on to Constantinople, where the Grand Vizier Ali Pasha gave him another magnificent reception.
After his arrival in Egypt, where he inspected the ports and ships bound for Europe, Adrien reviewed his observations and continued drafting his report, certain that he had uncovered the routes followed by the disease that sprang from the waters of faraway Indian lagoons to wind its long and deadly journey westward. The observations he made during this scientific expedition also confirmed his theory that cholera was spread by rats—always the first infected in new epidemics— which boarded ships mooring in Indian ports before sailing to Egypt, and then on to Europe.
After this long, arduous, often dangerous voyage, Dr. Proust had become an early authority on epidemiology. Henceforth he was a key member of France’s delegation to international conferences on the prevention of epidemics and a tireless, outspoken advocate for the establishment of an international sanitation system against the spread of disease.
Adrien later proposed that all ships bound for Europe be quarantined at Suez, the only place where vessels from India and the Far East converged. In La Défense de l’Europe contre la peste (The defense of Europe against cholera), he wrote, “Egypt must be considered Europe’s barrier against cholera.” His theory and proposals were not immediately accepted. Some international political figures, keen on maintaining their countries’ authority and autonomy, had been troubled by his statement that “questions of international hygiene reach beyond the borders established by politics.”16 Adrien’s battle against cholera proved to him that being an accomplished, innovative scientist did not suffice. To his scientific skills he added those of diplomacy in order to overcome the resistance to his proposals made by some nations, especially Great Britain, which saw this French doctor’s restrictive plans as a threat to the interests of its trading empire.17 It took a series of international conferences and the Bombay plague of 1877 before governments began to take steps that eventually implemented all Dr. Proust’s recommendations.
By November 26, 1869, Adrien had returned to Paris from his long mission and filed a report that was published the following summer in the government’s Journal officiel. Sometime during this period, fresh from his successful and daring expedition, acclaimed by scientists and officials of the Second Empire, Adrien met Jeanne Weil. In early August 1870, he set out again to inspect entry points between France and other countries. By August 27 he had returned to Paris on an important personal mission: to sign the marriage contract between himself and Mile Jeanne Clémence Weil. At the signing, the couple agreed to the creation of a joint estate as established by the Napoleonic Code.
On September 1, the day the battle at Sedan raged and sealed the fate of the Second Empire, Adrien moved into the new apartment that he and Jeanne would inhabit at 8, rue Roy, in the eighth arrondissement. The yearly rental of 2,500 francs indicated his new financial status. At age thirty-six, the busy, ambitious doctor was ready to take a wife and start a family.
After the Proust-Weil wedding and the banquet, over which hung the gloom of uncertainty about the country’s future, the couple settled into their Right Bank apartment near the newly completed Church of Saint-Augustin. As Adrien and Jeanne put away their wedding finery, they could hear the noises of civil strife erupting in the streets as the Second Empire began its death throes. The following day, Jules Favre and Léon Gambetta led a revolutionary mob from the meeting of the legislature to the Hôtel de Ville, the city hall of Paris, and proclaimed the birth of the Third Republic.
When more details of the fate of the emperor and his army reached Paris, Adrien and Jeanne, who had many friends in high positions, grew even more alarmed and saddened. The Second Empire’s sudden and disgraceful defeat shocked them. They, like many of their compatriots, had believed the rosy forecasts of vain, boastful leaders and generals. After the debacle at Sedan, nothing stood between the outer defenses surrounding Paris and the invading Prussian army. Only one short month before, in a world now vanished, Adrien had been invited to the Tuileries Palace, where Her Majesty Empress-Regent Eugénie had bestowed upon him the red ribbon of the Légion d’honneur for his heroic efforts against cholera. Now, with the humiliated and generally despised emperor a prisoner of the Prussians, the empress was preparing to flee incognito, escorted by her American-born dentist and friend Dr. John Evans, to exile in England. France was left to face the twin scourges of a military invasion that could only result in the siege of Paris and civil war, as the French divided into a number of seething factions, chiefly monarchists, republicans, and communists. Adrien, angry at the fiasco brought upon the nation by the ineptitude of both political and military leaders, determined to resume his normal activities in a world gone awry.
The siege of Paris began on September 19 when the Prussians surrounded the city and cut all lines of communication.18 Henceforth balloon post and carrier pigeons were the only means—and very uncertain ones at that—of communicating with the outside world. It was clear that the Prussians intended to starve the city into submission. The government estimated that the food supply would last only until January 20. Food rationing began, with the immediate result of soaring prices. Many suppliers and speculators hoarded food out of greed. Once beef grew scarce and expensive, the slaughter of horses for meat became commonplace. In a short time, Parisians, creators of one of the world’s most delectable cuisines, found themselves reduced to nibbling on dogs, cats, and even rats.
The capital now lived in fear of starvation, civil war, and bombardment by the Prussians. The French were poorly organized to handle an emergency on a vast scale, and the situation was made worse by the various factions within the capital who distrusted one another. In the poor districts, there was talk of rebellion, as a number of red divisions pushed for the creation of a revolutionary council that was to become known as the Commune. Some radicals suggested reinstating the Terror.
Both Adrien and Jeanne worried about the safety of their families. Even the region near Chartres and Illiers that had always seemed remote in times of national crisis was not safe. In October, Prussians sacked Châteaudun and occupied Chartres, only twenty or so kilometers northeast of Illiers. For several months Adrien had no word from his widowed mother. In December, desperate for news, he attempted to contact her by carrier pigeon. He sent an urgent message to a friend in Tours, the only destination accessible, where his family knew a draper named Esnault with whom his mother might have taken refuge: “Has she left Illiers? Is she with you? Is she all right? I beg you to send me answers to all these questions by carrier pigeon.”19 After some delay, Adrien received word that his mother had remained in Illiers safe from harm.
Adrien watched with alarm as Paris became filthy and rank. He saw conditions grow ripe for cholera, smallpox, and typhoid as garbage and human waste piled up in the streets, creating a terrible stench. With each passing day, the city resembled more and more the primitive countries he had visited on his scientific mission. Events soon justified his fears as the mortality rate doubled, then tripled.
Nathé Weil’s extraordinary decision to leave Paris was perhaps the best gauge of the siege’s severity. Among his eccentricities was a horror of spending the night anywhere except in his own bed. Once, before taking a brief excursion to the seaside resort of Dieppe, Nathé made certain he could return home by train the same evening. It was no different when he went on his daily visit to his half-brother Louis’s estate at Auteuil, on the outskirts of Paris. There, the two men would dine, discussing business and arguing about politics as they ate. No matter how heated the discussion or how delicious the food and wine he consumed at his brother’s expense, Nathé would never agree to stay the night, but always returned home to the rue du Faubourg Poissonnière. Now, with Paris becoming a cold, bleak, desperate city, slowly starving to death, Nathé made the single exception in his eighty-five years of life and took his wife to safety at Étampes. There, miserable but secure, they would wait for the madness to end.
Jeanne, eager to forget the chaotic world outside her new apartment, kept busy organizing the household and overseeing the servants. After trying various arrangements of the furniture, she found the one that worked best, making certain that her husband’s favorite chair was close to the fire. She had quickly learned his needs and habits as well as the abilities and shortcomings of the servants. The young wife read and played the piano, occupying herself as best she could, but Jeanne, like most Parisians, longed for one thing: the return to a normal life. One day, scarcely three months after her wedding, Jeanne realized that she was pregnant. Adrien, who had postponed marriage to pursue his medical career, received the news that he was to be a father with satisfaction. He regretted only that Jeanne must carry the baby during such violent and uncertain times.
The siege showed no signs of ending, and luck did not favor the beleaguered Parisians. By early December a severe winter began when the temperature sank to near freezing. Gas lines had been cut, firewood became scarce, and the food supply continued to dwindle at an alarming rate. Officials estimated that at best, no more than a month’s supply of wood remained. Snow came early; on December 21 the temperature hit a bone-chilling minus fourteen degrees Celsius. When white bread was no longer available, the government launched a propaganda campaign to convince skeptical Parisians of the virtues of brown bread. By the end of December a number of animals in the zoo had been sold at high prices and butchered, including two beloved young elephants named Castor and Pollux.
Early in the new year of 1871, the Prussians grew impatient and began bombarding the city. On January 14 the writer and diarist Edmond de Goncourt, a neighbor of Uncle Louis Weil’s at Auteuil, shot a blackbird, whose roosting habits he had observed, and ate him for supper. On January 19 the first bread rationing began, followed three days later by an alarming but not unexpected event. A group of furious, drunken communists and prisoners newly released from a Paris jail approached the Hôtel de Ville, where they exchanged fire with its defenders. This was the first incident in which French fired upon French. At last, on January 26, after a siege of 131 days and a bombardment that lasted 24, the government announced a truce agreement with the Prussians. An assembly would be elected to convene at Bordeaux, recently named the official seat of the French government, and debate a formal peace or a resumption of the war. The Prussians, who had every reason to be confident of their strength and the eventual outcome of peace or war, allowed Parisians to obtain fresh supplies of food and fuel.
No sooner had the truce been signed and elections held than the French conservative and liberal factions began fighting among themselves. Adolphe Thiers was chosen to preside at Versailles over a provisional government whose majority was conservative and favored the restoration of the monarchy. Meanwhile, the Communards and other leftists controlled Paris. From the beginning they distrusted the Versailles government because they believed that Thiers was too conservative and too eager to accept a humiliating peace with Prussia.
The treaty with Prussia imposed harsh terms on France: cession to Prussia of Alsace and a large part of Lorraine, plus the payment within three years of a war indemnity equivalent to a billion dollars in gold francs. Until the indemnity was paid, Prussian troops would remain in northern France. Thiers, insensitive to the hardships Paris had endured during the siege and indifferent to the fury its citizens felt over the peace treaty, announced measures the workers of Paris found equally severe for them: all landlords were entitled to demand full back payment on rent suspended during the siege; the National Guard’s daily salary of thirty sous would no longer be paid.
On March 18 the violent insurrection known as the Commune began when Thiers, in an attempt to disarm the Paris National Guard, decided to reclaim the cannons that had been moved to safety in the poorer districts of the city during the brief Prussian occupation. To recoup the weapons Thiers’s generals had planned an early-morning raid. The action began well, but once the government troops had taken possession of the cannons, they realized that no one had thought to requisition enough horses to transport the large guns. When the Communards awoke to discover what had happened, intense fighting began, during the course of which the rebels summarily executed two of Thiers’s generals. Paris found itself besieged by its own government.
Adrien refused to stay at home even on the days of heavy street fighting. As casualties mounted, Jeanne became frantic for his safety. Reminding him that she and the expected baby would need a husband and father, she urged him to be cautious while making his way through the dangerous, barricaded streets. Adrien explained that he had no choice; he was a doctor and must look after his patients and fulfill his teaching and administrative duties. If he had had the courage to travel on horseback through the most primitive regions of Russia, Persia, and Egypt, surely he could cross Paris to reach his office at the Hôpital de la Charité on the other side of the Seine.
One day in early spring, just after Dr. Proust left the apartment for the hospital, an insurgent aimed his rifle at the well-dressed bourgeois gentleman and fired. The bullet brushed Adrien’s clothes, barely missing its mark. Adrien was shaken by the incident, but Jeanne, almost six months pregnant, became sick with fear over the dangers he refused to avoid. He had vital duties to occupy his time while she had to stay at home, made miserable by worry about his safety, that of her parents, and the prospects for the future of the unborn child. She accepted her husband’s obligation to duty and admired his courage, but this did not make the situation easier for her, uncomfortably pregnant and living apart from her beloved mother. Jeanne’s parents grew alarmed at her condition and decided they would all go to Auteuil to await the birth of her baby. The traditional story has been that Jeanne fled with Adrien to the shelter of Uncle Louis’s estate after the narrow miss of the sniper’s bullet. But it is just as likely that the couple went there because it had become a family tradition to go to Auteuil during the warmer months, as did many other fashionable Parisians.20 An 1855 guidebook describes Auteuil as the spring and summer playground of retired bankers and lawyers who arrived accompanied by their cooks, grooms, coachmen, and valets.21
Uncle Louis, recently widowed, had made his fortune early as a businessman; he owned a button and silverware factory and fine property in Paris on boulevard Haussmann, an address that his future great nephew was to make famous. Known for his sense of humor and kindheartedness, Louis gladly took in his niece and her husband. Louis lived in a spacious, comfortable house in the middle of a large garden that had the appearance of a bucolic haven. Although Auteuil was not as removed from danger as Jeanne would have liked, it was safer than the streets of central Paris and close enough for Adrien to ride the trolley from Auteuil to Saint-Sulpice, the stop nearest his hospital. This was presumably a safer way to reach his office than striking out on his own from rue Roy through the bitterly contested streets.
Thiers, whose generals commanded well-trained and disciplined troops, had decided that there would be no negotiating with the Communards, whom he considered no better than common criminals. In April, Thiers began bombarding the city, an unthinkable act to most Parisians. Auteuil, which lay between Versailles and Paris, suffered heavy damage from the shelling. Edmond de Goncourt, the noted writer and future founder of the Académie Goncourt, lived in a house that took many hits. One shell pierced the roof, but Goncourt’s art treasures and memorabilia escaped harm. Auteuil’s fourteenth-century church was so heavily damaged that it was later torn down and replaced by a modern church. When the bombardment ended, many homes had been reduced to piles of smoldering rubble, but Uncle Louis’s property had not been hit. Jeanne and her family, although severely shaken, had remained safe from harm.
On May 16 the realist painter Gustave Courbet, who had become a zealous revolutionary, took part in the destruction of one of Paris’s most famous monuments, the Vendôme Column. Erected to commemorate the military victories of Napoléon I, the column was a shrine sacred to veterans but viewed by the Communards as an affront to the Republic and the brotherhood of man. This act was among many that caused support for the Commune to erode. During the uprising’s “bloody week,” May 21–28, Paris burned. Many of the fires were set by pétroleuses, women who threw kerosene bombs into public buildings and private homes.
On May 28, Generals MacMahon and Galliffet entered the city. The Commune, ill prepared to fight, quickly collapsed. In the following days, the victors inflicted a brutal repression on the Paris rebels as Thiers’s men rounded up more than seventeen thousand Communards, including many women and children, and executed them, dumping their bodies in mass graves. Peace had returned to the City of Light, but at a terrible price. Many areas lay in ruins, including the Palais-Royal, the Ministries of Justice and Finance, and most of the rue de Rivoli and the boulevard de Sébastopol. Fire had destroyed the Tuileries Palace, the vast section of the Louvre where Napoléon III and Empress Eugénie had hosted magnificent balls to the tunes of Jacques Offenbach’s lively operettas. The war and civil strife had left many severe wounds that needed to heal; there was rebuilding to undertake, the creation of a new government and constitution, and the payment of a huge war indemnity. In June, Adolphe Thiers was elected president of the Third Republic. Despite its bloody beginning, France was to prosper under the Third Republic, the longest in its history.
Adrien and the family decided that Jeanne, now in her last month of pregnancy, would remain at Auteuil until she gave birth and it was safe to return to the rue Roy apartment. On Monday, July 10, Saint Felicity’s Day, a baby boy was born at eleven in the evening. Jeanne’s labor was difficult and the baby seemed so weak that the family feared it would die. On July 13, at two in the afternoon, Adrien, the baby’s grandfather Nathé Weil, and great-uncle Louis Weil went to the town hall in the sixteenth arrondissement, where they signed a birth certificate bearing the child’s given names: Marcel-Valentin-Louis-Eugène-Georges Proust. During the next two weeks, Jeanne and Adrien slept little as they constantly took care of their baby, who remained in poor condition. Then, to their great relief, they realized that the little boy’s life was no longer in danger, although he remained frail.
The family blamed the infant’s precarious health on the privations, anxiety, and lack of proper nourishment Jeanne had endured during her pregnancy. They were also convinced that her distress when the sniper’s bullet nearly struck down Adrien had aggravated her state of nervous exhaustion as she approached term. Jeanne adored her son as much as she feared for his future. Devoting herself entirely to looking after the baby, she did everything possible to increase his chances of survival and make him strong. The constant attention and worry made necessary by events and the infant’s frail condition marked the beginning of an anxious, loving dependency. Bending over him, talking to him, encouraging him to be strong, she called him “my little Marcel” and “my little wolf.”22
On Saturday, August 5, Marcel was baptized at the parish church of Saint-Louis d’Antin. Although neither parent continued to practice a religion, the Proust children were raised as Catholics. Later, the boy would be proud of his certificates of baptism and confirmation signed by the archbishop of Paris.23 In spite of his great love for his mother, Marcel did not consider himself Jewish, although he never forgot or denied his heritage.
When Marcel was twenty-two months old, Jeanne gave birth to a second son. Jeanne and Adrien named Marcel’s little brother Robert-Émile-Sigismond-Léon. In August 1873 the family, needing larger quarters because of the new baby and Adrien’s rapidly advancing career, moved a short distance east to an apartment at 9, boulevard Malesherbes, not far from the church of the Madeleine.
The entrance to the building where the Proust family lived for the next twenty-seven years was a large, sculpted double wooden door. Inside was a spacious inner courtyard, at the back of which stood a stairwell leading to the second-story main entrance to the Proust apartment. The apartment contained four bedrooms: Marcel and Robert occupied the two at one end of the apartment between the kitchen and the bathroom. The parents’ bedroom was at the other end, near the living room, dining room, and water closet. Dr. Proust converted the fourth bedroom into an office, where he received private patients and wrote his speeches and books. The apartment, typical of the oppressive bourgeois style of the era, was “a rather dark interior, crammed with heavy furniture, all windows air-tight with curtains, smothered with carpets, everything in black and red . . . not . . . far removed . . . from the dark bric-a-brac of Balzac’s time.”24
The birth of a sibling and the move to a new apartment at first shocked the toddler Marcel, whose love for his mother became more exclusive and tyrannical now that he had serious competition for her attention and caresses. In time, Marcel understood that his relation with her was unique and not in jeopardy, for Robert required little attention, preferring to roughhouse with children his own age, play outdoors, and impress his father with feats of athletic prowess. In the first photographs of the two little boys, Marcel adopts a protective attitude toward Robert, placing an arm around him or holding his hand.
Robert’s earliest memories of Marcel were of a benevolent, tender older brother who “watched over me with an enveloping, infinite sweetness that was, so to speak, maternal.”25 Robert, like many second children, experienced none of the difficulties and traumas of the first. The family always believed that the younger brother had the advantage of being conceived and born in a stable time. Unlike Marcel, he was not subject to fits of hysteria and tantrums; most often, he seemed the epitome of a bright, happy, normal baby. Robust like his father, athletic, and diligent as a student, he seemed the ideal son. Robert did, of course, demonstrate typical childish behavior. He was possessive about toys, refusing to lend them to playmates his age, sharing only with Marcel, or with his father on those rare occasions when the doctor could spare a few minutes to play with his young sons, who delighted in the attention. Robert would say to Marcel: “You’re nice; you’d never hurt me. Here, I’ll lend you my tipcart!”26 These memories from childhood were always infused with the sunshine of the countryside, whether in the more distant garden at Illiers or in nearby Auteuil.
In December 1873 Adrien published his acclaimed Essai sur l’hygiène internationale. The doctor had begun to concentrate on the specialization that was to occupy him for the rest of his life.27 He added an appointment to his medical responsibilities when he became chief of the Sainte-Perrine hospital in Auteuil, creating a professional attachment to the little town just outside Paris. For the next twenty-five years, Uncle Louis’s home at Auteuil was the Proust family’s second home, a peaceful oasis where they spent most of the spring and early summer days. Louis had purchased his property in 1857 from actress Eugénie Doche, who had created one of the century’s most celebrated roles, that of Marguerite Gautier in Dumas fils’s play La Dame aux camélias. The atmosphere in the Auteuil house, redolent with the perfumes of courtesans and actresses, perfectly suited Uncle Louis, who adored beautiful actresses of easy virtue.28 Eugénie had decorated her residence in the Napoléon III style, and Louis did not bother to alter the decor or furnishings. Valentine Thomson, a cousin who visited Marcel at Auteuil, described the furnishings as “grim, frumpy, solid furniture, smothered with frills of silk, dark and uninviting like a roomful of ancient, overdressed maiden aunts.”29
Louis’s house, built of quarrystones, was large, with spacious rooms, including a drawing room with a grand piano and a billiard room, decorated with flower stands, where the family sometimes slept when seeking a cooler room during heat waves.30 Surrounding the dwelling was a sizable lot of 1,500 square meters. Two small buildings standing next to the street served as a stable for the horses and as servants’ quarters. The garden contained a pond surrounded by hawthorn trees, whose blossoms Marcel also admired in Uncle Jules’s garden in Illiers. Among the abundant flowers and trees that were to embellish the pages of his future novel, hawthorns occupy a privileged position. In the back of the garden stood a building used as an orangery.31
Jeanne and her mother must have liked the property immediately, not only for its beauty but because of Auteuil’s place in literary history. Fashionable during the final third of Louis XIV’s reign, Auteuil had been home to many of Jeanne and her mother’s literary idols: Molière, Racine, and Boileau had all lived there at one time. So had the eighteenth-century painter Hubert Robert, celebrated for his romantic depictions of Roman ruins. In the nineteenth century, the village had been the temporary home of François-René de Chateaubriand and the beautiful hostess Mme de Récamier, as well as Victor Hugo.32 The Goncourt brothers, Edmond and Jules, had purchased a house on the boulevard Montmorency, where they took up permanent residence in 1868. The two brothers were extraordinarily close and shared a passion for literature and collecting objets d’art. They had collaborated on pioneering plays, novels, and above all their diary, known as the Journal des Goncourt, which became their most famous work and a major chronicle of their era. In 1870 Jules died at Auteuil, leaving the older Edmond alone to continue their work.
For the almost daily trips to Paris, Jeanne and Adrien had a number of choices: they might take the family carriage or the Zone railway that took passengers to the Saint-Lazare station; to go directly to his home office, Dr. Proust could take the double-decker Auteuil-Madeleine omnibus, which his faithful servant Jean Blanc would keep waiting when it stopped at Louis’s gate, while Adrien kissed his young family good-bye.33 By taking the trolley that ran from Auteuil to Saint-Sulpice, he could easily reach the Left Bank and the School of Medicine. On extremely hot days, the family would board one of the steamboats that ran from Auteuil to the center of Paris.
Louis, who seemed to relish the proverbial role of childless, rich uncle, eagerly adopted Jeanne’s family. He invited many relatives and friends to copious Sunday dinners. For these reunions, servants would fill the dining room vases to overflowing with white roses cut from the garden. In the haven of Auteuil, this close-knit family delighted in one another’s company and in the pleasures they shared: gossip, books, letters, and informal family concerts.
In 1876 Louis, in his most ostentatious display of avuncular affection, added a wing to the main house for Jeanne and her family. The addition contained two bedrooms on the second story, two on the third, and a large attic room on the top floor that was most likely used by Marcel and Robert as a study.34 The boys adored Uncle Louis Weil, whom they would tease, calling him the “squire of Auteuil” or “the thin squire of Auteuil,” a not so subtle allusion to Louis’s expanding girth and reputation as a bon vivant and gourmet.35
When Robert was a toddler, Marcel enjoyed relatively good health. In warm weather the boys spent hours together outdoors. At Auteuil they played in the garden and wandered the paths between the arbors. On one occasion, after hiding their clothes in the bushes, they pretended to be savages and burst out stark naked in front of their flabbergasted family. But Marcel’s favorite activity by far was reading. He would curl up in one of the large wicker chairs on the lawn and lose himself entirely in an adventure story such as Théophile Gautier’s Le Capitaine Fracasse or another novel on his mother’s approved list.
The house and garden at Auteuil remained vivid in Proust’s memory. A few years before his death, he reminisced about the vanished dwelling in a preface he wrote for a friend’s book.36 His impressions, typically, play on all the senses: “This house where we lived with my uncle, in Auteuil in the middle of a big garden... was completely lacking in style. Yet I can hardly describe the happiness I felt when, after having come up rue La Fontaine in bright sunlight and in the fragrance of the linden-trees, I went up to my room for a moment.” There he always recalled the smooth, lush, heavy blue satin Empire curtains, the simple odors of soap, and the reflections in the mirrored armoire. All the sights and smells inside the house were intensified by the cool, close air kept in by doors and windows shut against the heat. In the dining room, he chose a thick crystal glass from which he drank apple cider so chilled that when he swallowed it, the refreshing liquid “would press against the sides of my throat in an adherence that was total, delicious, and profound.” The atmosphere of the room was transparent, congealed “like a block of marble veined by the odor of cherries already piled high in the fruit-dishes, and where the knives—in the most vulgar bourgeois style, but one that enchanted me—were posed on little prisms of crystal. The iridescences emanating from them did more than add a mystic quality to the smell of gruyère cheese and apricots. In the half light the crystal knife-rests projected onto the walls rainbow rays resembling ocelli, like those on a peacock’s tail, that I found as marvelous as the stained-glass windows at Reims.”37
The house and grounds at Auteuil, like the relatively few trips to Illiers, seem to have made a more lasting impression on Marcel than did the family apartment in Paris. With Marcel’s constitution becoming stronger, the happy, carefree days returned for the Prousts. There were signs as well that France had begun to recover from the destruction left by the war and civil strife. The staggering indemnity to Prussia had been paid much sooner than required, a feat that amazed all observers. France was about to enter a period of remarkable change and prosperity that became known as the Belle Époque.
Jeanne Proust possessed a lively mind, an unfailing sense of humor, and a profound appreciation of literature and music, combined with common sense and a firm belief in traditional bourgeois values. Although somewhat shy and self-effacing, she was strict with her sons regarding proper dress and grooming, neatness, manners, handwriting, and language, including the use of dignified expressions. She later destroyed her adolescent sons’ letters if the handwriting and contents did not meet her high standards of taste and refinement. She also tried, with no success, to teach Marcel the value of money.
His mother’s influence was the most important in Marcel’s life. Not only did he strive to be like her; nature had made him like her, at least in outward appearance. One had only to see them standing next to each other to realize that his face bore many of her traits: the same oval shape, the same large, dark eyes. As Jeanne gazed lovingly at the child whose visage reflected hers, her Marcel, her little wolf, she must have been aware that he appeared remarkably unwolflike. The boy was frail and anxious, and burst easily into tears. How to make him able to stand on his own should something happen to her? She wanted him to be strong and independent and devoted herself to that goal. Although he displayed all the symptoms of a mama’s boy, Marcel does not seem to have been a sissy. He eagerly joined in childhood games, enjoyed fishing, and took horseback riding lessons.
With his father often away or working when at home, Marcel’s mother and grandmother Adèle Weil supervised his cultural education, exposing him to what they considered the best works in literature and music, spending many hours nurturing and feeding his insatiable curiosity. They taught him languages, primarily German and Latin, and arranged for additional study with private tutors. In 1881, when he was nine, Marcel wrote a short letter in German to his grandmother on her birthday, wishing her much happiness and that she be spared a tooth extraction.38 In the letter, he mentioned that he had considered writing her in Latin as well.
Marcel and Robert both took piano lessons because music was an important part of family life, both for study and pleasure. Jeanne often played classical music, especially Mozart and Beethoven. Toward the end of his life, Marcel recalled one of the many recitals held in the Weil household when a cousin, Louise Crémieux, an accomplished singer and actress, sang Mozart arias.39
Jeanne and her mother took turns introducing their favorite books to Marcel. When he was eight years old, the book he liked most was Alfred de Musset’s Histoire d’un merle blanc, a tale that shares some features with The Ugly Duckling.40 The rare white crow is rejected by his own kind because he is so different. Not only is he white but he is unusually sensitive and kind. To an amazing degree this story foreshadows young Marcel’s rejection and misunderstanding by his high school classmates, many of whom did not know what to make of the gifted but eccentric boy.
Marcel’s grandmother, who admired George Sand’s pastoral novels, likely read to him from La Mare au diable (The devil’s pond), La Petite Fadette (The little fairy), Les Maîtres sonneurs (The master bell ringers), and François le Champi, skipping the passages in which there was a hint of sexuality. François le Champi, a romance of country life, tells the story of a foundling (in the Berry dialect champi means a child abandoned in the fields) who is taken in by a very young miller’s wife named Madeleine Blanchet. Unconsciously, François and his adoptive mother fall in love when he is old enough to leave home. Later he returns, finds the widowed Madeleine struggling to pay the debts amassed by her worthless husband, and becomes her protector. Slowly, they recognize their love. After they have confessed their devotion to each other on the spot where Madeleine discovered François as a foundling, they marry. François le Champi, with its strong incestuous theme, appears in À la recherche du temps perdu, where it underscores the child Narrator’s excessive love for his mother.41
Proust, who as an adult considered Sand’s novels inferior, remembered that her prose had breathed goodness and moral distinction, qualities that his mother’s beautiful voice easily made apparent.42 Moral distinction, best represented in the Search by the grandmother, was a virtue that Marcel learned to prize in his childhood. In Jean Santeuil, the mother initiates Jean into the love of poetry by reading to him from Alphonse de Lamartine’s Les Méditations, Pierre Corneille’s Horace, and Victor Hugo’s Les Contemplations. She believes that “good books,” even if poorly understood at first, can nourish the child’s mind and benefit him later.43
When Marcel was older, his mother and grandmother read with him the great seventeenth-century works of which he acquired a special understanding and appreciation. He came to love the tragedies of Jean Racine, whose masterpiece Phèdre, in its depiction of obsessive, destructive jealousy, haunts the pages of the Search. Adèle remembered from her aunt’s salon the actress Rachel, France’s most acclaimed tragedienne of the first half of the century, whose greatest success had been as Phèdre. As the grandmother read scenes from Corneille’s and Racine’s plays to the captivated Marcel, she described the actress’s astounding interpretations of the tragic heroines.
Adèle’s enthusiasm and knowledge created in Marcel an intense curiosity about the theater. Later, he was particularly intrigued by Sarah Bernhardt, who had assumed the mantle of Rachel. It was said that Bernhardt had invented a more natural style of acting, surpassing even that of her illustrious predecessor. Marcel would cross boulevard Malesherbes and stand on the sidewalk in front of the Morris Column to read the theatrical posters advertising Bernhardt’s reprisal of her role as Phèdre, a performance that had all of Paris buzzing with excitement. He studied the poster with extraordinary concentration, trying to divine from the intricacies of the lettering and the names before him the secret rituals of the theater. Marcel longed to be old enough to go to the theater and see the Divine Sarah in her most famous role.
In 1847 Adrien’s older sister, Élisabeth, had married Jules Amiot, descendent of an old and wealthy Illiers family and one of the most respected merchants in the town. Jules had spent many years in Algeria, where he and his brothers prospered as wine merchants and developed a taste for exotic curios. After his return to Illiers and his marriage, Jules operated a successful notions shop at 14, place du Marché, opposite the church of Saint-Jacques. It was to Jules and Élisabeth’s house in the rue du Saint-Esprit that Adrien would return with his wife and two young sons during Easter and part of the summer holidays. At Easter the town was at its best, offering wildflowers and trees in bloom that Marcel adored and could not find in Paris.
In Jean Santeuil, Proust describes, in a humorous, affectionate way, the relationship between his parents (thinly disguised as M. and Mme Santeuil) by contrasting their personalities and aptitudes.44 The passage, concerning plans for the annual Easter trip to Éteuilles (Illiers), begins with M. Santeuil’s announcement that because Easter is early this year the weather at Éteuilles will not be warm. Mme Santeuil, who has “plenty of taste in matters of literature . . . and considerable skill in the running of a household,” is “ignorant in matters of meteorology . . . and other of the sciences.” She is “always amazed that Monsieur Santeuil should know that Easter would be early in any given year and found in this evident proof of his superiority yet one more reason for silently renewing her admiring praise and for reaffirming that vow of docile obedience which she had once registered in the secret places of her heart.”45
On the Thursday before Easter, the Prousts usually went by rail from Paris to Chartres, where they changed trains for the short ride to Illiers. Seen from afar as the train approached, Illiers was contained in its steeple, just as is Combray in the Search: “Combray at a distance . . . was no more than a church epitomising the town, representing it, speaking of it and for it to the horizon,... as one drew near, gathering close about its long, dark cloak, sheltering from the wind, on the open plain, as a shepherdess gathers her sheep, the woolly grey backs of its huddled houses.”46
Marcel and Robert were impatient to leave the train when it stopped briefly at the small station. The four Parisians usually walked to the Amiots’ house from the station, carrying the blankets that had kept them warm on the train, along with their parcels and suitcases, down the rue du Chemin de fer, lined on both sides with linden trees. Turning left at the rue de l’Oiseau flesché, they passed in front of the ancient hostelry of the same name. Marcel always noticed the optician’s sign consisting of a large pair of spectacles, one lens blue, the other orange, unaware that one day he would transport these glasses hanging high above the optician’s shop into the fictional Combray, where they became a symbol of his book and his conception of the novel.47 Crossing the intersection of the rue Saint-Hilaire, the family arrived in the rue du Saint-Esprit, where the Amiots lived in a gray, relatively modest row house with half-timbered walls. Jules Amiot had acquired the house, dating from the First Empire, when he returned to Illiers. After 1885 Jules enlarged the property and created another entrance at the back of the garden, behind the house, where he installed an iron gate opening onto the tiny Place Lemoine.
The Amiot household was ruled over by Ernestine Gallou, a remarkable servant who remained with the family for more than thirty years.48 A solid, strong woman embodying the timeless virtues of rural France, she saw that the guests from Paris were comfortable and well fed. She needed all her strength and resources when the Prousts came to visit. Not only were there extra beds to make and mouths to feed, but one of the guests was Marcel, who, whether at home or on vacation, always gave servants additional work because of special requests deemed beneficial to his frailties. Prone to colds, allergies, insomnia, and indigestion, Marcel exploited his ailments to wield strict control over his environment whenever possible. He and his mother insisted that he be indulged, like a budding tyrant. In Jean Santeuil, the admonishments Mme Santeuil gives Ernestine on arriving are no doubt typical of those the real Ernestine received from Mme Proust: “I needn’t remind you, Ernestine, that Master Jean must have a bottle in his bed, not just hot water, but boiling, so that he can’t bear his hands on it: or that the top end of the bed must be made very high, almost uncomfortable—I’m sure you remember that—so that he can’t possibly lie flat even if he wants to, four pillows, if you can spare four; it can’t be too high.”49 But Marcel was ordinarily so benevolent, charming, and grateful that most of the members of the household were happy to oblige him. The dilemma for the family, at Illiers just as at Auteuil, was the degree to which he should be indulged. Weren’t they spoiling him? Would it not be better to teach him fortitude and make him stronger? His parents, frightened like all good parents of being too strict or too indulgent, struggled to find the delicate balance that would be just right for their elder, complicated son.
Ernestine Gallou served her copious, delicious meals, made of the best fresh produce available in the market that day, in the dining room whose heavy furniture and dark wooden panels dated from the First Empire. At the end of the meal, Uncle Jules, who liked to cook, would mix together the strawberries and cream, always in identical proportions, stopping only when he obtained the exact shade of pink he sought, thus combining “the experience of a colorist and the divination of a gourmand.”50 He made the coffee in a glass apparatus that Ernestine, right on cue, brought to the table. The guests would delight at the spectacle of the hot, fragrant, brown liquid shooting to the top of the bell-shaped glass container. Sometimes, the family took coffee in the small salon, whose door, in the form of a Gothic arch filled with stained glass in hues of red, blue, green, and yellow, looked out onto the garden. Here, in this small sitting room, Jules displayed some of the African trinkets collected during his years in Algeria.
Before bedtime, as a last treat for the boys, the family watched a magic lantern show made possible by a brightly colored projector set on the top of one of the oil-burning lamps. Marcel and Robert watched in wonderment as images of Geneviève de Brabant and the wicked Bluebeard or the equally villainous Golo moved across the wall in “an impalpable iridescence, supernatural phenomena of many colours,” sometimes leaping, if the projector moved, onto the curtains and doorknob.51 After the slides and a bedtime story, the boys went to sleep in rooms whose bland style-broken only by uninteresting knickknacks lying on furniture tops—resulted no doubt from the childless household. As Marcel lay waiting for sleep to come or plotting a way to lure his mother back into the room for one more good-night kiss, he took no comfort from the pious religious images of the Virgin Mary and Christ on the wall. Sometimes he felt so lonely and desperate when his mother left him at night that he identified himself with the wretched man abandoned by his own father and nailed to the cross.
While in Illiers, Marcel also visited his elderly grandmother Proust in her tiny apartment above the store. Relatively little is known about her except that she was an invalid cared for by an old servant. She apparently did not make a lasting impression on either of her grandsons, for she is not mentioned in any meaningful way in any of the preserved letters or documents. Yet what we do know makes her a more likely model for the hypochondriacal Aunt Léonie in the Search than Proust’s Aunt Élisabeth Amiot, generally considered the original model.52
Although on vacation, Marcel and his parents never let pass an opportunity for him to learn. He studied the rudiments of Latin with the canon Joseph Marquis, whose great interest in local history later inspired him to write a book.53 When not declining Latin nouns and botanizing with the priest in his garden, the boy took long walks in the countryside and along the Loir River, following its towpath lined with poplar trees.54 He and Robert also continued their piano lessons. Because the Amiots had never acquired a piano—an unthinkable situation for Jeanne—a worthy of the village who owned one allowed the boys to come for daily lessons and practice.55 The normally bookish Marcel enjoyed fishing with cousins of varying degrees, or hiding with Robert in one of the ruined medieval towers, the only vestiges of an ancient fortified castle that stood between the town and the river.
Jules, whom Marcel called his “early rising, gardening uncle,” indulged his passion for horticulture by spending a portion of his wealth on the creation of a large pleasure garden just beyond the banks of the gently flowing Loir. He called it the Pré Catelan, after a section of the Bois de Boulogne in Paris. It must have seemed natural to Marcel, a Parisian who often played in the Bois, for his Illiers uncle to name his own garden after the one in Paris. Although Jules’s Pré Catelan was no more than a postage stamp compared to the one in the capital, for the little town of Illiers its proportions were impressive. The name held in common by the two principal gardens of his childhood may have provided the first linking in Marcel’s mind of the two spaces, Auteuil and Illiers, that inspired his fictional Combray.
In his garden, Uncle Jules had dug an artificial pond, in which he planted water lilies and other aquatic flowers; he then stocked the water with fish for his nephews to catch. In Jean Santeuil, Jean’s grandfather creates alongside the Loir an identical garden that rose gradually until it reached “the same height as the wide plain where La Beauce began, to which a gate provided a way of entrance. This high point of the garden was of considerable width and was occupied by a magnificent asparagus bed and by a small contrived pond.” A “mechanical contraption” turned “by one of Monsieur Santeuil’s father’s horses . . . forced water up from the canal below where Jean . . . played his line for great carp which he soon had lying beside him on the grass among the buttercups.”56 From the pond flowed a narrow, meandering stream over which Marcel and Robert could jump with ease if they decided not to use one of the little footbridges that crossed the water here and there throughout the garden. The Pré Catelan seemed an earthly paradise for the boys, who liked to pretend they were knights or to play hide-and-seek or simply to throw stones into the water.
Uncle Jules had constructed in the middle of the garden, halfway up the gently sloping ground, a small, brick, gabled belvedere, known by the family as the “house of the archers,” and furnished it so that his relatives and friends could read, rest, and meditate while enjoying the view. On the south end of the garden a magnificent row of hawthorn trees slowly rose up the side of the garden, leading to a large white gate that opened onto fields of blue cornflowers and brilliant red poppies fanning out to the west and south on the plain toward Méréglise and the château of Tansonville.
Amiot died unaware that his nephew’s fame would one day draw visitors from over the world to admire his creation, the only surviving garden of Proust’s childhood and the model in Swann’s Way for Charles Swann’s park at Tansonville near Combray.57
Adrien often took Marcel and Robert on walks to show them where he had played as a child. He pointed out to his boys how two different topographies come together at Illiers: the Beauce, a flat, windy plain that, as it moves westward, meets the Perche, whose hilly terrain is ravined by streams rolling down to feed the Loir River. The Beauce plain, naturally covered with herbaceous plants, is ideal for the cultivation of wheat, whereas the Perche’s rocky forests are more suited for apple trees and livestock, primarily horses and cattle. Illiers prospered as the central marketplace for these two distinctive but complementary regions.
In the Search, the defining features of Combray’s fictional topography approximate those of Illiers where the two walks—one the landscape of an ideal plain, the other a captivating river view—embody, for the child Narrator, two separate worlds: “My father used always to speak of the ‘Méséglise way’ as comprising the finest view of a plain that he knew anywhere, and of the ‘Guermantes way’ as typical of river scenery.”58 On the walk that became the “Méséglise” or “Swann’s way,” Adrien led his sons south of Illiers, out toward Vieuvicq and Tansonville, passing “fields of wheat undulating under the sharp wind that seemed to arrive in a straight line from Chartres.”59
As Adrien and his sons made their way back from Tansonville, it was the steeple of Saint-Jacques, appearing now and then in the sky as they mounted a hillock or rounded a bend, that beckoned them home. This rather modest parish church contains vestiges of earlier constructions dating from the eleventh and fifteenth centuries; the choir stalls and enclosed pews date from the era of Louis XIII. The visitor enters through the old Romanesque doorway with double arches, all that remains of the original edifice. Perhaps the church’s most striking feature is the beautiful wooden Gothic vault, whose brightly decorated beams were hewn from trees that had grown in nearby forests.
Proust later used a motif found in the church’s sculpted wood as one of the most powerful symbols of his art. On either side of the wall behind the altar stands a wooden statue of a saint above whose head is placed a scallop shell, a motif repeated elsewhere on the paneling inside Saint-Jacques. Such shells are the emblem of Saint James and were worn in the Middle Ages by the pilgrims on their way to Santiago di Compostella in Spain. The church of Saint Jacques, as its name indicates, was a stopping point on the major pilgrim route. The scallop shells also provide the form of the little cakes known as madeleines, symbol of a key revelation in the Narrator’s quest to find his vocation as a writer.60
On fine days in Illiers when Marcel walked south toward Tansonville and Vieuvicq, he might pass Montjouvin, with its old mill on the Thironne River, and stop to admire the water lilies. Next to the mill he explored the ancient park in whose thick foliage had been discovered a dolmen and a mysterious circle of monoliths. Not far from the river a sacred wood surrounded an ancient tomb called the Tombelle-de-Montjouvin. Here had stood an old castle, presumably built atop a dwelling dating from Paleolithic times.61
On his walks through the river country north of Illiers, Marcel spied on the large manor house at Mirougrain, built on a gentle slope overlooking a large lily pond in the middle of which floats a tiny island supporting a weeping willow tree. This house offers an extraordinary architectural feature and an intriguing history. In the decade before Marcel’s birth, the property was acquired by a young woman whose grave in the Illiers cemetery bears the simple inscription Juliette Joinville, poet. After taking up residence at Mirougrain, Juliette, then only twenty, and her servants combed the woods looking for dolmens or any druidical stones, which she used to cover completely the façade of the house. Her determination to withdraw from the world and live in quiet seclusion produced the opposite effect. Everyone, including Marcel, who heard about the boulder-encrusted house wanted to see it and catch a glimpse of Juliette. Rumors spread that she had come to Mirougrain to hide because she had been spurned by her lover; others believed that she had retreated here to receive secret, nocturnal visits from Emperor Napoléon III, a notorious womanizer.62 Proust remembered the impressions evoked by this strange dwelling later when creating the composer Vinteuil’s house in the Search. He adapted the name of the old mill Montjouvin but used the setting and atmosphere of Mirougrain, minus the dolmens, for the lesbian love scene between Vinteuil’s daughter and her friend.
The names of the streets, old inns, manor houses, and ruined churches of Illiers and its surroundings—Tansonville, Méréglise, Montjouvin, Saint-Hilaire, rue de l’Oiseau flesché—continued to live in Proust’s memory and imagination, until he used them, with slight alterations or none at all, as part of the material out of which he constructed Combray, a place that exists only in the pages of his book.
Of all Marcel’s indelible impressions of childhood, the two most important were the beauty of flowers and the pleasures of reading. Although he enjoyed fishing and games with Robert and other playmates, he spent most of his time absorbed in books, which he read when the weather was fine in Uncle Louis’s Auteuil garden or in the nearby Bois de Boulogne. In Illiers, Marcel’s two favorite spots for reading were in the small garden behind the house or in the spacious belvedere in the Pré Catelan. In either spot, he spent “silent, sonorous, fragrant, limpid hours” at a stretch, reading the novels of Gautier, Sand, Balzac, or Hugo.63 Sometimes he did not even hear the church bell strike the hour: “The fascination of my book, a magic as potent as the deepest slumber, had deceived my enchanted ears and had obliterated the sound of that golden bell from the azure surface of the enveloping silence.”64
Young Marcel had the strong, playful imagination of any normal child, but he also possessed an amazing ability to see and the patience to remain still and concentrate, to the point of appearing lost in a trance, when he came upon an object of beauty that seized his attention: a woman, a church, or a flower. In Illiers he became intoxicated with the spectacle of nature, especially of flowers and trees that bloomed in the surrounding countryside. He marveled at the splendor of hawthorn trees and apple trees when covered with white or pink blossoms. Proust later depicted an astonishing variety of flowers as manifestations of beauty and as symbols of desire and sexuality.
On one trip to Illiers, Marcel fell in love with the hawthorn trees whose blooms of white and pink line the south side of the Pré Catelan. Sensitive also to the splendors of churches and the poetry of religious ceremonies, on one occasion, he, with Robert’s assistance, placed hawthorn branches dripping with blossoms on the altar of the Virgin Mary.65 Marcel was so captivated by these flowers that he insisted on going to the Pré Catelan and bidding them good-bye before returning to Paris.
The early draft of what became the “farewell to the hawthorns” in the Search recounted an incident involving Robert, forced by his parents to leave behind a pet goat. This incident most likely occurred in September 1878, when Marcel was seven, during a late summer vacation in Illiers or Auteuil.66 On the day in question, Marcel and Robert were both angry with their parents for not having told them that their mother was leaving to visit a friend and was taking Robert with her. Marcel hated any separation from his mother and was hurt at being left behind. Robert, upset that he could no longer keep the little goat and his prized cart, took his revenge by hiding, in hopes that his mother would miss the train. Earlier in the day, a relative had taken him to be photographed, and Robert was still dressed as was deemed appropriate for a studio photograph of a very young boy. His mother had clad him in a dress with lace skirt, curled his hair, and tied it up with ribbons. Furious that he must leave his goat and toys, Robert had a tantrum, ripped off his clothes, pulled the ribbons from his hair, and yanked his curls in an attempt to straighten them. For good measure, he smashed his toys and then, to the consternation of his mother, defiantly sat down on the railway tracks. Robert even made a little speech for her to overhear: “My poor little goat, you’re not the one who tried to make me sad, to separate me from those I love.” He then began to weep.
Dr. Proust arrived and pried the child loose from the tracks, whereupon Robert told his father that he would never again lend him the goat cart, the worst punishment the little boy could imagine. Marcel, intensely upset with his parents’ duplicity and betrayal, had to resist the urge to set the house ablaze. In the Search, this scene, after revisions, is given to the Narrator, when, as a child, his parents force him to leave his beloved hawthorns: “‘Oh, my poor little hawthorns,’ I was assuring them through my sobs, ‘it isn’t you who want to make me unhappy, to force me to leave you. You, you’ve never done me any harm. So I shall always love you.’ And, drying my eyes, I promised them that, when I grew up, I would never copy the foolish example of other men, but that even in Paris, on fine spring days, instead of paying calls and listening to silly talk, I would set off for the country to see the first hawthorn-trees in bloom.”67
But as the Narrator remarks in a draft of the hawthorn passage, this promise, like most of those made in childhood, was not to be kept.68 His oath of fidelity sprang from his desire to maintain the innocent and absolute affection of a child whose heart is filled with wonder and love.
While engaged in the healthy activities of a normal boy, Marcel experienced the accidents and mishaps of childhood. At age eight, while playing on the Champs-Élysées, he tripped and broke his nose. The fall left him with a barely visible bump in his nose that, during his adolescence, he would fret about in a way that struck his friend Fernand Gregh as “coquettish.”69 But the incident that had lasting consequences occurred in the spring of 1881, when Marcel was nine. The Proust family, accompanied by friends, Dr. Simon Duplay and his wife, had enjoyed a long walk in the Bois de Boulogne. As they returned, Marcel suddenly developed severe difficulty in breathing and collapsed. He nearly died in the arms of his terrified father. Marcel had been brought down by his first attack of asthma, a condition that would plague him, altering his health, his morale, and his habits. After the first severe attack, he lived in fear of suffocation. Robert, who witnessed the seizure, recalled that from then on his older brother, now officially certified as nervous and sick, had to give up “outings in the open air, the beauty of the countryside, and the charm of flowers because of the threat to his lungs.”70 Although there were periods of respite, he suffered from asthma and respiratory problems for the rest of his life.
More than a decade after the first attack, Marcel described in a novella about love and jealousy, L’Indifférent, the sensation of suffocating and the fear of imminent death. He compared a child’s first experience of breathlessness to the feeling of panic and doom that overcomes the lover upon learning that the beloved is soon to depart on a long voyage: “A child who has been breathing since birth, without being aware of it, does not realize how essential to life is the air that swells his chest so gently that he doesn’t even notice it. But what happens if, during a high fever or a convulsion, he starts to suffocate? His entire being will struggle desperately to stay alive, to recapture his lost tranquillity that will return only with the air from which, unbeknownst to him, it was inseparable.”71
Asthma reminded Proust of the sensation of sheer terror, of gasping for air, for life, that overtook him when he found out that his mother was leaving on a trip and, eventually—when he had become so dependent on her presence and comfortings—even when she came to his bed to tuck him in and kiss him good night before retiring. He did everything possible to make her stay. This separation, the most hateful experience he knew, was as unsettling to him as the moment in childhood when we learn the inevitability of solitude and death.
Years later, after his mother’s death, Proust recalled the childhood episode in a letter to Maurice Barrès: “Our entire life together was only a period of training for her to teach me to live without her for the day when she would leave me, and this has been going on since my childhood when she would refuse to come back ten times and tell me good-night before going out for the evening.”72 Proust wrote a description of this scene, which he later referred to as the drama of the good-night kiss, in Jean Santeuil. Jean is seven years old when he experiences such dependency on his mother and is diagnosed by the doctor as suffering from a nervous condition.73
In the Search, Proust dramatized a similar scene, generally thought to be autobiographical and to have taken place at Auteuil, depicting the Narrator’s dependency as a child on the presence of his mother. It is the mother’s habit to tuck him in and to give him one last kiss before going to bed. On nights when company is present and she is not free to come up to the room for the kiss, he is particularly upset. On one such night, he waits up for her and then implores her to remain with him. She does not want to yield to his nervous anxiety, but the usually stern father intervenes and capriciously tells her to stay with the boy. She reads to him François le Champi, and though she skips the love scenes, the incestuous nature of the story perfectly suits the occasion. The child, incredulous at the easy violation of a strict rule, feels fortunate but guilty for having caused his mother to abandon her convictions. He will spend the rest of his life trying to recover the will and energy he lost that night at Combray and to expiate the wrong done to his mother. This scene, representing Marcel’s primary childhood nightmare of separation from his mother, illustrates how Proust eventually learned to make his private demons serve the plot and structure of his novel. His material and psychological dependency on his mother remained, until her death, one of the defining traits of his personality.
To cure himself of asthma and hay fever, young Proust underwent many nasal cauterizations, whose purpose was to destroy the erectile tissue and render his nasal passage insensitive to pollen: “I had such faith that I underwent no cauterizations, hardly pleasant. Doctor Martin told me, ‘Now, go to the country, you will no longer suffer from hay fever.’” Marcel left with his parents for the country, but as soon as he encountered lilacs in bloom, he was “seized with such violent asthma attacks that, until they were able to bring me back to Paris, my hands and feet remained purple like those of drowning victims.”74 Marcel’s asthma was severe and, at times, extremely dangerous.75 The many painful treatments he endured are proof of his eagerness to be cured.
Adrien and Jeanne were both vigorous individuals who enjoyed long walks for their health. As a pioneer in hygiene and preventive medicine who believed in the scientific treatment of maladies, Adrien advocated discipline and a strict regimen. Jeanne even preferred to walk in strong gusts when vacationing on the beach. In one letter to her, Marcel hopes she is having such weather, because “you like a bracing wind.”76 In the Search, similar traits are given to the grandmother, whose love of walks in the rain and the freedom to breathe are marks of her simplicity and fundamental wellness in body and soul: “My grandmother, in all weather, even when the rain was coming down in torrents . . . was to be seen pacing the deserted rain-lashed garden, pushing back her disordered grey locks so that her forehead might be freer to absorb the health-giving draughts of wind and rain. She would say, ‘At last one can breathe!’”77
As a child Marcel often vacationed with his mother and grandmother on the Normandy coast at resorts made popular by the expansion of the railroads. In September 1880 he went to the fashionable seaside resort of Dieppe, the beach closest to Paris and France’s oldest seaside resort. After Marcel developed asthma, the Proust family began to spend longer periods of the summer vacation on the coast because Adrien believed the sea air would benefit his son’s lungs. In a letter to his grandfather in September 1881, Marcel speaks of the pleasures of Puys, a small village near Dieppe. Only ten years old, the child explained why the Normandy coast would always hold such an attraction for him: Puys was “a very small village, very pleasant, very picturesque, that combines the pleasures of the countryside with those of the shore.”78 The joining of farmland and beach created a perspective that he never failed to admire.
Marcel, in an 1888 letter to his mother, evoked the memory of happy vacation days spent at Le Tréport, just north of Dieppe, where he simply enjoyed breathing the sea air and stretching his limbs as he walked the long shingle beach, backed by tall cliffs. In a notebook that Jeanne kept, she recorded another letter from Marcel in which he recalled being on the beach with his grandmother, huddled together as they conversed, while walking into the wind.79
On occasion, he accompanied his mother in Paris to the Deligny Baths, a large wooden structure anchored in the Seine near the Concorde Bridge. Jeanne, seeking relief for health problems, regularly bathed in the cold water.80 After waiting in a cubicle for her to change into her swimming costume, Marcel would emerge to find Jeanne already bathing. The wooden platform on which he stood to watch her and the other swimmers rose and fell with the current of the river. Amazed and frightened, Marcel imagined that this strange, watery cavern was the entrance to the underworld. In Jean Santeuil, Proust depicted Jean’s mother “splashing and laughing there, blowing him kisses and climbing again ashore, looking so lovely in her dripping rubber helmet, he would not have felt surprised had he been told that he was the son of a goddess.”81 Beautiful, yes, and powerful, too, but would she emerge safely from the dark, deep water? Would she remain with him or leave through an underground passage with one of the male bathers, abandoning her child forever as she pursued unknown, forbidden pleasures?
The child Marcel, in his constant fear of being abandoned by his mother and suffocating to death, sensed that we are always walking on thin ice. Just below the surface of what appears to be a solid, lovely world—Paris, and later Venice—churn the dark, icy waters of solitude and death. By the time Proust wrote the Search, his mother’s loveliness and mythological attributes at the Deligny Baths had vanished. The memory had darkened even more, and the Narrator speaks of what he dreaded most, being abandoned by his mother. The scene, now set in the watery city of Venice, describes the Narrator’s refusal, at the appointed time, to depart with his mother, who leaves for the train station without him. As he sits contemplating what to do next, the view of the dock basin of the Arsenal filled him with that “blend of distaste and alarm which I had felt as a child when I first accompanied my mother to the Deligny Baths, where, in that weird setting of a pool of water reflecting neither sky nor sun . . . I had asked myself whether those depths . . . were not the entry to Arctic seas.” A gondolier begins singing in the distance, and “in this lonely, unreal, icy, unfriendly setting in which I was going to be left alone, the strains of O sole mio, rising like a dirge . . . seemed to bear witness to my misery.”82
The miseries of childhood, along with its incomparable joys, were being stored to serve a larger purpose for the man Marcel was to become. On those spring and summer days when his father was too busy to go to Illiers, or when foul weather or Marcel’s health made the trip seem ill advised, the boy had to remain in his room, unhappy, exiled from nature and the pleasures of the season. He evokes such a moment in Jean Santeuil when a fly buzzing awakens in Jean a vision of days gone by: “Then, all of a sudden, he would see a picture of that lovely Illiers time, with the apple-trees all in blossom in the paddock, the tiler hammering in the street, when he had gone fishing in the lake.”83 Marcel, in whose future lay endless days of isolation in his room, ultimately learned that there was only one way to return, only one way to know what it had really been like, by re-creating his lost world in a book. Auteuil and Illiers, as later transformed by Proust into the mythical place he called Combray, contain the lost treasures of Proust’s childhood:
The Méséglise way with its lilacs, its hawthorns, its cornflowers, its poppies, its apple-trees, the Guermantes way with its river full of tadpoles, its water-lilies and its buttercups, constituted for me for all time the image of the landscape in which I should like to live, in which my principal requirements are that I may go fishing, drift idly in a boat, see the ruins of Gothic fortifications, and find among the cornfields . . . an old church, monumental, rustic, and golden as a haystack; and the cornflowers, the hawthorns, the apple-trees which I may still happen, when I travel, to encounter in the fields, because they are situated at the same depth, on the level of my past life, at once establish contact with my heart.84