Chapter 1
THE GARDEN OF AUTEUILT
HE doorway of the house where Louis Proust was born, in
the Rue du Cheval Blanc at Illiers, is a single stone arch of
exactly the same form as the double arch in the romanesque side-
porch of the nearby church. It would be wrong to infer that there
is something ecclesiastical about the houses of the people of
Illiers; the truth is rather that there is something domestic about
the church of Saint-Jacques. But the PrOusts tended to have a
vague connection with the church. When Louis Proust married
Virginie Torcheux, about 1827, he moved to II Place du Marche,
opposite Saint-Jacques, and sold spices, thread, sugar, wooden
shoes and tallow-candles to his fellow-citizens; but in the room
behind the shop he made wax-candles for all the worshippers in
the parish, and dreamed of the day when his son would be a
priest. His first child was a girl, Elisabeth, born 16 August 1828.
His son Adrien was born on 18 March 1834, and in due course
won a scholarship to the high school at Chartres, where he took
his baccalaureate in letters and science. Towards the end of his life
Adrien Proust made light of the honours with which his profes-
sion and his country had loaded him, and boasted of a distinction
which somehow meant far more: "My name is in the roll of
honour of the College de Chartres," he said. But, like his sori
Marcel after him, he could not fulfil his father's ambition; he
decided that his vocation for the priesthood was insufficient and,
without losing his Catholic faith, became a convert to science. In
July 1853, two years before the death of Louis Proust, he passed
the necessary certificate of aptitude for physical sciences and
went to Paris to become a doctor. No Proust had ever left Illiers
before him; it was a turning-point in a chain of events which
led, deviously and inevitably, to A fa Recherche du Temps
Perdu.
The heroic age of French medicine was just beginning; the
learned but hitherto Molieresque profession of healing was being
transformed into an experimental, and therefore an exact, science,