Marcel Proust: A Biography

'4 MARCEL PROUST
Good Friday; and when they left the great cathedral on its grey
plateau they travelled south-west for fifteen miles through the
endless flat land of the Beauce. As they drew near to IIIiers they
watched through the carriage window for the first sight of the
spire of Saint-Jacques; for 'Combray at a distance, seen from the
train when we arrived there in the week before Easter, was
nothing but a church that epitomised the town'.1 It was the signal
for Dr Proust to say: "Fold your rugs up, we shall be there in a
minute"; and they hastily collected their luggage for leaving the
train, which waited, as it still waits, only two minutes at IlIiers,
and then 'ran on over the viaduct, leaving behind it the frontiers
of Christendom whose extreme limit, to me, was marked by
Combray'.^2 After crossing the railway-line they walked down the
Avenue de la Gare under the still leafless lime-trees, turned right
into the Rue de Chartres, left across the market-place into the Rue
de la Place; and there, on the opposite side of the Rue du Saint-
Esprit, was the house of Aunt Amiot. The frozen travellers
warmed themselves by the dining-room fire, while Uncle Jules
tapped the barometer in hope that the fine weather would return,
and Mme Proust ordered Marcel's hot-water bottle ("Not just
hot, boiling") and his pillows ("So that he can't lie down even if
he wants to, four if you have them, they can't be too high"). That
night the child would wake with a beating heart, as the two
booming notes with which Saint-Jacques chimes the quarters
trembled on the dark air; to-morrow or the next day, to him as to
the good people ofIlliers who slept around him, habit would have
made them inaudible.
His bed was screened by high white curtains, and covered in
the daytime with flowered quilts, embroidered counterpanes and
cambric pillowcases which he had to remove and drape over a
chair, 'where they consented to spend the night', before he could
go to bed. On a bedside table stood a blue glass tumbler and
sugar-basin, with a water-jug to match, which his aunt always told
Ernestine to empty on the day after his arrival, 'because the child
might spill it'. On the mantelpiece was a clock muttering under a
glass bell, SO heavy that whenever the clock ran down they had
to send for the c10ckmaker to wind it again; on the armchairs
were little white antimacassars crocheted with roses, 'not without
thorns', since they stuck to him whenever he sat down; and the
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