Combray!

Given my proud background as an academic nerd, it was only a matter of time before I managed to make it to Proust's hometown. I mean, seriously, I've been to the Rutherford B. Hayes house and the Warren Harding memorial (both in Ohio), so I clearly had to get out to the birthplace of someone who's actually interesting.

I had tried to go to Illiers-Combray back during my year in Colmar, but it's actually kind of tricky to get there. It's hard enough to get there from Paris (even though it's not far away), let alone from Colmar. So it didn't happen back in 04-05, but when some other grad students announced they were going this weekend, I jumped right on that bandwagon.

To get to Illiers-Combray, you have to go through Chartres, site of the famous cathedral:


We had an hour-long layover in Chartres, which was a bit of a hassle in the sense that it made the trip out to Illiers a little longer, but we were actually quite pleased in the end because it allowed us to make a quick trip to see the cathedral. I had been there in 1998 on my very first trip to France but hadn't been back since. It was nice to see it again, just on general princple.

The Chartres cathedral is one of the more recognizable cathedrals in the world, thanks to the mismatched spires. In one of the more noteworthy cases of following the crowd, the second spire is different because the cathedral took so long to build that the styles had changed. So rather than keeping the second one the same as the first, the later generations of architects decided to be trendy and adapt, symmetry be damned. Love it!

The town itself is also quite attractive, this is the main square in front of the cathedral:


Anyway, from there we hopped on a little regional train to head out to Illiers-Combray:


A hilarious note on the name of the town: back when Proust knew it (late 1800s), it was just called Illiers. But then in 1971 in honor of the centennial, they changed their name to Illiers-Combray, based on the famous first half of Swann's Way, in which the narrator discusses his childhood in a fictional town called "Combray." But of course the whole question about what's based on fact and what's fiction is the big issue in Proust, so it's fairy clear that Combray was heavily based on Illiers. So yeah, the town totally took credit for it and added Combray to their name to capitalize on the Proust connection, haha.

The thing that's surprising, though, is that you'd think a town that would go to the effort of changing its name to profit from Proust would also do more to encourage tourism. In fact there's almost NOTHING THERE. Seriously. Here's the main square:


We arrived right around lunch time and were starving, so we started looking around for a place to eat. The grocery store on the square was closed for lunch from 12-3, haha. And we couldn't find any boulangerie to get sandwiches. We finally decided to ask a local (once we found one, there was actually no one around) where the nearest boulangerie was, and he was like, "oh, hmmm, there's really only one in town, and I think it's closed on the weekends, so I guess if you want lunch you'll have to try the local butcher..."

We went to the butcher and managed to cobble together a lunch, which was totally fine. But we thought it was pretty remarkable that the town immortalized by one of France's most famous writers ever would have almost nothing available for tourists, haha. The only other game in town was this overpriced kitschy salon de thé:


Totally lame, but since it was basically the only game in town for having a cup of tea and a madeleine, we had no choice. Obviously this picture had to happen, haha:


Needless to say, in the interest of not being miserable for the rest of the trip I didn't actually eat the madeleine, but I still had to have my picture taken with it, haha.

From there, we went to Proust's aunt's house:


I'm not going to engage in the narrator as Marcel/not-Marcel debate here, but the idea is that this is the prototype for Tante Léonie's house in the book. And of course it's the world described here that comes out of the encounter between the narrator and the tea/madeleine. The house is now a museum totally devoted to promoting the world of the book, complete with the magic lantern:


In the house I was also able to get a pic with the big man himself, haha:


From there we wandered over to the river and the gardens:



The funny thing about both the river and the garden is that we thought they'd be huge. But as you can see, they're actually quite small. In the end, though, this is totally appropriate. In the book, the narrator is always building things up to be epic, then is disappointed when he sees/experiences them in real life (the idea being that the world in your head is more glorious than the actual reality of life). Anyway, the fact that we were super excited to see Combray and then were somewhat disappointed by the real thing is as Proustian as it gets. So yeah, it was actually a perfect trip, haha.