very well, it told us, but national pride, what the French called la gloire (glory) came first.
Heavy chains attached to empty shell casings fenced off the memorial. On one of these, facing the monument, perched the only living thing in sight, a gray pigeon. It didn’t fly off as we approached. Rather, it appeared to be in rapt contemplation of the rooster on top of the obelisk.
“Maybe it lost someone,” Louise said. “One of those pigeons that carried messages.”
A single tree-lined avenue out of the square suggested a route into town, so we took it. When I looked back, the pigeon still hadn’t moved.
Thirty minutes later, at a table on the deserted central square, Louise sipped an eau à la menthe and I drank a beer. We had seemed to be the only strangers in town until an English family colonized the next table. After ordering a single coffee, mother, father, and both children disappeared, one after the other, into the dark interior.
“That toilet must be the most popular spot in town,” I said.
“At least it’s open .”
Illiers certainly presented no threat to Disneyland. Everything except the café and the church was shut. This included the sparse one-room visitors’ center, where a stony-faced lady handed us a map, and the former home of Proust’s great-aunt, now a museum. We’d arrived there at midday, to be told by the lone gardienne that it was about to close for lunch.
“When do you reopen?”
“Two thirty,” she said, with a look that suggested I’d asked a silly question.
Two and a half hours for lunch? This was so excessive that I recognized the statement of principles behind it. This Marcel Proust was only a writer , people! Nobody really important . Opposite, a bakery advertised itself as “where Tante Léonie bought her madeleines.” It, too, was closed, with blinds pulled down and no suggestion they would ever rise again.
“To live in Combray,” Proust wrote, “was a trifle depressing.” I could see why. As Luke Skywalker complains of his home planet in Star Wars , “If there is a bright center to the universe, this is the place furthest from it.”
For two hours, we explored anyway. Illiers had been modestly prosperous once, but those days were gone. Shutters had been up for decades at the bains-douches municipaux , where, in the days before home plumbing, one could take a weekly bath. Nor were there any women at the public laundry where wives and housekeepers once knelt around the communal pond, gossiping as they pounded their clothes clean.
At 2:30 sharp, the gardienne at the house of Tante Léonie, more cheerful after her lunch, unlocked its black metal gates.
The little house had barely changed since Proust lived here between the ages of six and nine, at the end of the 1870s. In the kitchen, simple country pots and pans covered the table. Climbing the narrow, winding wooden stairs, we dipped our heads to pass through low doors, smiled at the narrow beds, the flowered wallpaper, the faded oil paintings—all just as Proust describes. Only the attic was different. It now contained a photo gallery of Marcel’s family and friends, a menagerie of bushy beards, extravagant hats, and men in stiff collars glaring at the camera. If you smiled in those days of long exposures, it tended to come out as a ghastly grin.
Finally, we stepped into Léonie’s bedroom. On the table next to her bed, in a glass case, like holy relics, sat a white ceramic teapot; a cup, saucer, and spoon; a dish of dried lime leaves; a bottle of Vichy-Célestins mineral water; and a delicately fluted madeleine.
As I stood in reverent contemplation, Louise pointed to the mineral water.
“Vichy-Célestins. The kind mamine likes.”
She was right. Her grandmother—my mother-in-law, Claudine—shared an older person’s preference for fizzy mineral water. And both slept in almost identical beds, in the Second Empire style, with the same scroll-backed wooden headboards.
It surprised me how serious an
Heavy chains attached to empty shell casings fenced off the memorial. On one of these, facing the monument, perched the only living thing in sight, a gray pigeon. It didn’t fly off as we approached. Rather, it appeared to be in rapt contemplation of the rooster on top of the obelisk.
“Maybe it lost someone,” Louise said. “One of those pigeons that carried messages.”
A single tree-lined avenue out of the square suggested a route into town, so we took it. When I looked back, the pigeon still hadn’t moved.
Thirty minutes later, at a table on the deserted central square, Louise sipped an eau à la menthe and I drank a beer. We had seemed to be the only strangers in town until an English family colonized the next table. After ordering a single coffee, mother, father, and both children disappeared, one after the other, into the dark interior.
“That toilet must be the most popular spot in town,” I said.
“At least it’s open .”
Illiers certainly presented no threat to Disneyland. Everything except the café and the church was shut. This included the sparse one-room visitors’ center, where a stony-faced lady handed us a map, and the former home of Proust’s great-aunt, now a museum. We’d arrived there at midday, to be told by the lone gardienne that it was about to close for lunch.
“When do you reopen?”
“Two thirty,” she said, with a look that suggested I’d asked a silly question.
Two and a half hours for lunch? This was so excessive that I recognized the statement of principles behind it. This Marcel Proust was only a writer , people! Nobody really important . Opposite, a bakery advertised itself as “where Tante Léonie bought her madeleines.” It, too, was closed, with blinds pulled down and no suggestion they would ever rise again.
“To live in Combray,” Proust wrote, “was a trifle depressing.” I could see why. As Luke Skywalker complains of his home planet in Star Wars , “If there is a bright center to the universe, this is the place furthest from it.”
For two hours, we explored anyway. Illiers had been modestly prosperous once, but those days were gone. Shutters had been up for decades at the bains-douches municipaux , where, in the days before home plumbing, one could take a weekly bath. Nor were there any women at the public laundry where wives and housekeepers once knelt around the communal pond, gossiping as they pounded their clothes clean.
At 2:30 sharp, the gardienne at the house of Tante Léonie, more cheerful after her lunch, unlocked its black metal gates.
The little house had barely changed since Proust lived here between the ages of six and nine, at the end of the 1870s. In the kitchen, simple country pots and pans covered the table. Climbing the narrow, winding wooden stairs, we dipped our heads to pass through low doors, smiled at the narrow beds, the flowered wallpaper, the faded oil paintings—all just as Proust describes. Only the attic was different. It now contained a photo gallery of Marcel’s family and friends, a menagerie of bushy beards, extravagant hats, and men in stiff collars glaring at the camera. If you smiled in those days of long exposures, it tended to come out as a ghastly grin.
Finally, we stepped into Léonie’s bedroom. On the table next to her bed, in a glass case, like holy relics, sat a white ceramic teapot; a cup, saucer, and spoon; a dish of dried lime leaves; a bottle of Vichy-Célestins mineral water; and a delicately fluted madeleine.
As I stood in reverent contemplation, Louise pointed to the mineral water.
“Vichy-Célestins. The kind mamine likes.”
She was right. Her grandmother—my mother-in-law, Claudine—shared an older person’s preference for fizzy mineral water. And both slept in almost identical beds, in the Second Empire style, with the same scroll-backed wooden headboards.
It surprised me how serious an
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