MARCEL PROUSTSaint-Andre has been variously identified as Notre-Dame-de-
Champde at Chateaudun, or Saint-Loup-de-Naud, or a little
church in the Rue de la Maladrerie at Illiers; but Proust was no
doubt thinking primarily of the porches of Chartres, and next of
the concentrated essence of the gothic churches he visited in the
early 19oos. 'In order to describe a single church, one needs to
have seen a great many,'l he says in Le Temps Retrouve; and even
the church of Saint-Hilaire at Combray has paving from Lisieux
and Dives, and stained glass from Evreux, Pont-Audemer and
the Saint-Chapelle in Paris. He took the name of Combray from
Combres, a village a few miles past Mereglise; but it suggests the
Combourg of Chateaubriand's boyhood in Brittany, the Camhrai
in Flanders of which his friend Bertrand de Fenelon's famous
ancestor was bishop; and there is an actual Combray in Normandy
near Lisieux. He generalised Illiers so that it should become
universal, the paradise of innocent vision from which every
human being is expelled at the end of his childhood. He shifted
the known landscape of Illiers to give it the kaleidoscopic quality
of a dream-the kind of dream in which, going a little past the
furthest point reached in childhood walks on the outskirts of an
inland industrial birthplace, we find ourselves in sight of Paris or
the sea.
The most far-reaching adjustments occurred, however, not in
the topography but in the people of Combray. Proust wished to
make Comb ray a symbol of the family; and so that all the family
should be there, he imported his maternal grandparents and Uncle
Louis Weil (who, as Uncle Adolphe, takes possession of Jules
Amiot's den in the garden), although it is probable that they never
visited Illiers. Grandfather Weil, indeed, was notorious for never
having spent a night away from Paris in all his eighty years,
except during the siege of 1870, when he took his wife to Etampes
for safety. Whether the great-aunt (who teases Swann for living
near the Halle aux Vins) and Aunts Flora and Celine (who thank
him so obscurely for the present of Asti) ever existed, remains
unknown. Perhaps they too belonged to Paris and his mother's
side of the family; though in Journees de Lecture the great-aunt
seems identical with Aunt Elisabeth Amiot before she became
bed-ridden. Jules Amiot disappears from the novel: since his
garden had been made over to Swann, his function as 'the
1 ill,9^07