Marcel Proust: A Biography

THE GARDEN OF ILLIERS "3
mass, the first avatar of the Duchesse. Even the presence of
Gilbert the Bad is not far to seek. The arms of the marquises of
Illiers (or, six annulets azure, three, two and one) appear on the
seventeenth-century roofheams; it was their first ancestor,
Geoffroy d'Illiers, builder of the castle of Illiers, who suggested
the desperate life and horrihle end of Gilbert the Bad; and Basin,
the second Lord of Illiers, a contemporary of William the
Conqueror, gave his name to Gilbert's descendant, Basin, Duc de
Guermantes. The most celebrated member of the family was
Florent d'Illiers, who fought beside Joan of Arc (whose statue is
in the market-place outside the church-porch) as lieutenant of the
Bastard Dunois, and was buried in Saint-Jacques; he appears
along with Christ, Saint Jacques, Saint Hilaire and Miles d'Illiers,
Bishop of Chartres, in a window over the choir. From a female
cousin of Florent descended the poet Ronsard, and by die
Chantemesle branch the Marquises of Illiers were connected with
the Balzacs.^1 Throughout the seventeenth century they employed
the Prousts as their stewards and stood as godparents to their
children. The Lords of Illiers could not trace their descent as far
back as the Duchesse de Guermantes's ancestress Genevieve de
Brabant, wife of the eighth-century Count Palatine Siegfried,
whose wrongful accusation of adultery by the infamous Golo was
part of the repertoire of the magic lantern in Marcel's bedroom;
but they helped to create the Guermantes's, to ensure that Marcel,
in his childhood at Illiers, should see the French nobility as living
symbols of a mediaeval past, miraculous survivors of a glowing
window in a gothic church and the nursery-tales flashed in green
and scarlet on his bedroom wall.
Marcel's uncle made up for the minuteness of his back-garden
by possessing two other gardens. In the Rue des Lavoirs, which
continues the Rue des Trois Maries on the way to the River Loir,
and is so called from the stagnant oblong tank, surrounded by a
lean-to shelter, where the laundry of Illiers is washed, he had a
vegetable-garden; and at the far side of the river, on the edge of
open fields, was his pleasure-garden, the Pre Catelan, which he
proudly named after the famous enclosure in the Bois de Boulogne
at Paris.
As they walked down the Rue des Lavoirs to the Pre Catelan,
1 Cf. II, lOB, for the probable emotions ofM. de Charlus ifhe had learnt
that the Guermantes's were related to the Balzacs.