À la recherche de Marcel Proust

Yes, petits, I have done it. That most misguided form of literary worship, the pilgrimage. 

We forget sometimes that writers' experiences are not in themselves unusual; it's the prowess, the vitality with which they describe the ordinary that consecrates their particular experience as notable. The reality will undoubtedly be a letdown: a narrowing to concrete form what was before a beautiful amorphous visualization, imbued with our experiences, and thus the emotions and associations by which we connected to that author in the first place. For me, volumes II-IV of Proust will always be interwoven with where and when I read them for the first time: in Victoria and Vancouver, Canada, at age seventeen, to the soundtrack of an Elly Ameling album of Schubert lieder I had uploaded from a CD I borrowed from the library. Like Proust's narrator, who falls in love with Gilberte the moment he sees her among the blooming hawthorns in the garden at her family's estate, I fell in love with not only Proust's work but the milieu in which I encountered it.

But how could I be within an hour and a half of Combray and not see it?

So I  bought my ticket at the SNCF boutique and set off Saturday for my pilgrimage. I present the results, narrated with pictorial assistance.

To be exact, the town itself is called Illiers-Combray. They added the second part in the 1970's as an homage to Proust, who is the source of a significant tourist industry for this quiet, tiny town a half hour outside of Chartres.

After disembarking and taking a short hike downtown, I dropped by the Syndicat d'Initiative, the tourist information bureau, where a very nice woman gave me some brochures and a map and asked for my nationality. "We're curious about statistics," she tells me.

It was late Saturday morning, and the streets were almost entirely empty. I was listening to my Proust playlist (yes, I'm really that nerdy), but stopped now and then to listen to the great Nothing. One can actually hear the birds: imagine. I think one could see the stars at night there as well.

One thing that surprised me was how old the town was. Some buildings dated back to the three-digit years. Many buildings had part of the original structure charmingly exposed, like this.

There's a kind of glassy-smooth, translucent stone here that comprises many of the old buildings. It must be from around the area.

A silent street as I made my way to the Église Saint Jacques, called by Proust Saint Hilaire.

Proust on the steeple: "Often in the Square, as we came home, my grandmother would make me stop to look up at it. From the tower windows, placed two and two, one pair above another, with that right and original proportion in their spacing to which not only human faces owe their beauty and dignity, it released, it let fall at regular intervals flights of jackdaws which for a little while would wheel and caw, as though the ancient stones which allowed them to sport thus and never seemed to see them, becoming of a sudden uninhabitable and discharging some infinitely disturbing element, had struck them and driven them forth... And certainly every part one saw of the church served to distinguish the whole from any other building by a kind of general feeling which pervaded it, but it was in the steeple that the church seemed to display a consciousness of itself, to affirm its individual and responsible existence."

The doors.

Inside the church. Note the pews, which are elevated and require you to open a small gate and step inside. There's room for about 2-3 people per box.

The organ loft.

This, friends, is a doll in the window. I made her acquaintance as I walked toward Swann's Way. What is she doing in the window? You tell me.

The last remaining tower of a very ancient fort. Complete with moat, it would seem.

Du côte de chez Swann.

A hint of how important the Proust tourism is to this town.

A quiet little section of the jardin that serves as the first place the narrator and his childhood love, Gilberte Swann, meet: a place of ecstasy and wild fecundity. In reality, the garden was planted by Proust's uncle, who also designed the house in which he stayed as a child for Easter holidays in Combray. You will see this later.

I stole these pebbles from the walkway. They're that smooth stone that looks so lovely I want to lick it. I put them in my pocket and took them home with me; they're sitting a few inches from my computer right this moment.

After walking Swann's Way (the opposing walk, the Guermantes Way, is displaced by about a hundred kilometers, and would require another journey), I ate a mediocre lunch in one of three restaurants in town that were open. Afterwards, I walked around until 14:30, when the first guided tour was scheduled for Aunt Léonie's house.

The house belonged not to Proust's great aunt, but to his aunt and uncle. He and his family (he had a younger brother whom he erased entirely from the novel) stayed there for several Easter holidays, and a number of important scenes in the first volume of his novel are connected to or take place there.

Proust's uncle had been to North Africa and incorporated a number of Moorish elements into the design of the house. Proust describes this effect of the stained glass windows pouring colored light into the room.

The kitchen where Françoise, the cook and housekeeper for Aunt Léonie, worked. Apparently based on the cook who really did work for Proust's aunt and uncle. Fantastic character: full of contradictions and weaknesses, but strong willed and very, very good at her job.

Proust's bedroom. On the nightstand is a copy of the Sand novel the narrator's mother read to him in a pivotal scene early in the first volume.

The "magic lantern," complete with its slides, with which the nervous narrator's grandmother coaxed him to sleep.

Aunt Léonie's bed, by whose side the narrator accepted a morsel of madeleine soaked in tea, the taste of which serves later as the key to his recovering a flood of memories of Combray. One sees in the glass case the accoutrements, including a dessicated madeleine and some herbal tea leaves.

One is not supposed to take any pictures in the house, actually; I sneaked back into the house after the guided tour was over and snapped them on the sly.

After leaving the house, I spent a decent amount of time in the gift shop and came away with three books and a student membership to the Société des Amis de Marcel Proust. The woman who sold me my ticket and the woman who gave the tour, both of whom were behind the counter chatting, kept looking at me with great interest. I think they were wondering how someone who had accidentally swapped two simple words while buying a ticket for the museum was dawdling around and flipping through these French books with such enthusiasm.

Oh, yes, petits, after some deliberation about what a sucker I was, I went ahead and bought some madeleines. Supposedly, they have a different shape that's only done here. That I didn't buy.

The shop where I bought them advertised itself as "where Aunt Léonie bought her madeleines." Which is silly for two reasons: a) Aunt Léonie is fictional, and b) in reality (and in early drafts), the catalyst for the famous madeleine recollections was actually a brittle cookie of sorts, something like a zwieback cracker.

After sitting at a café for a bit, I found myself wondering what else was to be seen in Illiers-Combray. The obvious answer was nothing, so I hopped on the train early and gave myself a couple of hours in the city where I would change trains: Chartres.

A strange statue in the square just outside the Chartres SNCF station.

The claim to fame here is the cathedral.

And for good reason.

After passing this strange statue (why were the dolls haunting me?),

I stepped into the church. Which was jaw-droppingly magnificent.

As I was here, taking this photograph, music cued up. They were beginning a mass.

By the time I took this picture of the incredible carvings, I had decided to sit in.

One is not allowed to take photographs during mass, of course. But I accepted a leaflet with the readings and music from the man in the aisle who handed them out and took a seat in the back, near the outside.

I don't often consider the fact that these cathedrals were meant for something other than looking beautiful. Sure, my mother, though not religious, often lights a candle, and one does see people praying in the chapels from time to time (I always feel so embarrassed for them somehow, as though I am watching through their open window as they dance or undress), but it's easy to forget the ordinary masses. That even in the grand cathedral of Chartres, there are parishioners and church event bulletins and fundraisers. 

So I stayed, and as a well-trained Catholic schoolgirl, I know the mass like an old song. I understood it in French, understood the sermon, but of course I didn't know the Nicene Creed or the Lord's Prayer in French. The priest announced the sign of peace, and I awkwardly carried out the greetings with my neighbors. Despite being in this enormous and beautiful church where the echoes are so long the priest waits for each sentence to dampen, despite the fact that I am American and atheist, it felt so ordinary. But this time, I won't get Saturday detention because I sneaked out while my row mates filed up for communion.

I'm glad I went to Illiers-Combray. It's like meeting someone you've heard so much about. The first few minutes are awkward. One must quickly adjust one's preconception to make room for perception. But it is the Word Made Flesh, and there really is something to seeing it at last. And as I read Combray again (I've begun to read it in French), I will add yet another layer of context to my ever-building understanding.

In a way, the town's very ordinariness compels me to work harder on my own novel. Ordinary experience only transcends ordinariness, after all, through extraordinary narrative.

My next picture log will recount today: my trip with Amy and Sophia to the catacombs.