A day in the Footsteps of Proust in Illiers-Combray
In this reflective essay, Emre Aracı retraces the delicate geography of memory through a pilgrimage to Illiers-Combray—the small French town immortalised by Marcel Proust as Combray in "À la recherche du temps perdu". Weaving together literature, music, childhood recollection and the sensual alchemy of rain, scent, and silence, Aracı charts a journey not only across provincial France, but inwards—into the lost contours of personal and collective memory. Along the way, he invokes not only Proust and his poetic landscapes, but also Reynaldo Hahn, Abdülhak Şinasi Hisar, Charles Scott-Moncrieff, and even Sultan Mehmed II, forming an intricate tapestry where Istanbul, Paris, and Illiers meet in unexpected resonance. Through fleeting encounters, ghostly architecture, and the quiet miracle of a madeleine poised beside a porcelain cup, this essay becomes not simply a travelogue, but a meditation on the enduring power of art to summon the past—and, in doing so, to illuminate the self.
"Illiers-Combray"; there is a peculiar truth enshrined within this hyphenated name—at once real and imagined—that is as unambiguous as the destination printed upon the SNCF ticket I hold in my hand. The departure times of trains bound for this place are firmly established; on my map, the little town lies clearly marked, some hundred kilometres to the south-west of Paris. And yet, had I undertaken this journey a century earlier, I would have alighted from the same Gare Montparnasse, travelled via Chartres, and reached only Illiers. Combray, at that time, did not yet exist—at least not on any map, nor in the minds of men. It had been dreamt, perhaps, by one solitary soul: the young Marcel Proust, who spent his childhood summers in Illiers and would later, in À la recherche du temps perdu, immortalise this little town beneath the veil of a new and enchanted name.
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| Marcel Proust by Jacques-Emile Blanche, 1892 (© Musée d'Orsay) |
But even he could not have foreseen that, in defiance of the erasures of time, he would achieve a singular victory: by transfiguring his memories into art, he discovered the means by which to keep them alive—permanently suspended in that alchemical blend of fragrance, sound, colour, joy and sunlight that he called Combray. Nor could he have imagined that one day, the very town which had inspired him would return the homage, adopting as its own the name he had conjured from memory and imagination. Thus was born Illiers-Combray: a hybrid creation, but one no less magical for its dual nature.
So, while the train ticket I hold may point to a geographical destination, it is in truth a passport to the past—a return to the golden realm of childhood. For, just as Proust maps for us the secret routes leading from adult consciousness back to the fragile terrains of early memory, so too does this pilgrimage carry me, not only to a provincial corner of France I would otherwise never have visited, but deep into the lost domains of my own youth.
It was a rainy morning—an October morning (as the faint ink stamped upon my train ticket by the machine at Montparnasse Station would later confirm: 4 October 2012, 10:49). The heavens had opened; rain was pouring in torrents. Leaning against the iron bars of the fifth-floor window of the old Hôtel Normandie—where we were staying, near the Palais Royal—I looked down into the street below, trying to make out the distant silhouette of the Bourse, and wondered whether I ought to abandon, in such inclement weather, the day-trip I had anticipated for so many years. Was I really to trudge through the mud along the banks of the Vivonne, on those pathways Proust had named the Swann's Way and the Guermantes's Way? Yet had I not planned this journey precisely in order to rekindle those sparks of imagination? What mattered the weather, after all? Was not the sound of rain one of my favourite sounds in the world?
What is more, amid a stack of postcards set out on a small table just outside the shop, I came upon a dozen reproductions of Jacques-Émile Blanche’s famous portrait of Proust—the original of which I had admired only the day before at the Musée d’Orsay, yet failed to find in the museum’s own boutique. I bought half the lot. And was it not the grand entrance of the Galerie Vivienne, opening onto the rue des Petits-Champs, and the peculiar echo of that street name, that had suddenly conjured for me memories of Tepebaşı in old Istanbul? No, I thought; I must not deviate from my plan. The journey had been resolved upon, and we would go—rain or no rain—to Illiers-Combray.
Montparnasse Station is, alas, one of the least charming of Paris’s railway termini. The elegant old building, known the world over through that extraordinary photograph of the 1895 accident—when a steam locomotive, failing to halt in time, burst through the station wall and plunged nose-first onto the street below—was, quite astonishingly, demolished in 1969. It fell victim to the wave of architectural vandalism then sweeping across Europe, much as did London’s Euston Station. In its place now stands a bleak modern structure, crowned by that hideous tower so offensively visible from every quarter of Paris—a monument less to progress than to aesthetic insensibility.
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| The long-vanished Montparnasse Station |
To be sure, there were those in the nineteenth century who saw the incursion of the railways into the heart of cities as vandalism in its own right. And yet, one cannot help wishing to step into Proust’s world through the very portal he once knew, to set out on one’s journey from the same station he departed, and to read Madame de Sévigné’s letters in the same kind of railway carriage he might have occupied. The present edifice, all soulless concrete and glass, may lack historical charm, but the spirit of the station—its unchanging rhythms, its departures and arrivals—persists in Proust’s literary universe, where time is always both passing and preserved.
Not far from here, too, is another place freighted with memory: La Closerie des Lilas, the celebrated café on Boulevard du Montparnasse, once frequented by Hemingway and by Yahya Kemal. Indeed, a small brass plaque, discreetly affixed to one of the tables, bears the name of the great Turkish poet. As our train slowly pulled away towards Chartres, I recalled, with a wry smile, the lunch I had once taken there in honour of his memory. Unfamiliar with the menu, I had ordered steak tartare, only to send it back in dismay and insist—perhaps scandalously, in a country where the rituals of cuisine are sacred—that it be cooked. That I was not thrown out on the spot remains, to this day, something of a mystery.
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| Emre Aracı on the Illiers-Combray train (photo © Bilge Aracı) |
As the train creaked into motion, slipping slowly away from the station, its rhythm seemed to merge into perfect harmony with the tempo of Proust’s monumental novel—a tempo so languid, so finely drawn, that it appears to slow time itself. My thoughts, meanwhile, unfold like a series of matryoshka dolls—emerging one from within the other, not in any rational sequence, but as disconnected vignettes, not unlike the ones I am choosing to recall in place of Madame de Sévigné’s letters. I remember, for instance, another stage of this personal pilgrimage, when I stood in the Musée Carnavalet before Proust’s modest nightstand, his lamp, his little brass bed—objects so ordinary, yet radiant with the quiet intimacy of the man who once inhabited them. And now, in my mind’s ear, I begin to hear Susan Graham singing À Chloris.
On a day so steeped in rain and melancholy, could there be a more apt accompaniment than this wistful belle époque chanson by Reynaldo Hahn? “Even kings”, sings the poet Théophile de Viau—his baroque verses exquisitely set to music by Hahn—“know not the joy that once was mine”; that is, of course, should Chloris indeed have returned his love. Yet does not Proust suggest, in his great novel, that such attachments—so often poised for disillusionment—are governed less by the affections of the beloved than by the projections of our own inner longings, cast outwards and reflected back to us as if by a dim and mottled mirror? As the train slips past the scaffold-clad fringes of Versailles—a palace strewn, one might say, with the heartache of centuries—the rain lifts, and quite unexpectedly, the sun breaks through. The dark clouds pass overhead like an endless road stretched across the sky, receding into the distance.
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| Sultan Mehmed II by Gentile Bellini |
When Proust’s monumental novel was first translated into English in the 1920s by C. K. Scott-Moncrieff, it appeared under the title Remembrance of Things Past. The phrase is drawn from the thirtieth sonnet of Shakespeare—“When to the sessions of sweet silent thought / I summon up remembrance of things past”—rendered in Turkish by Talât Halman as “Bazen geçmiş günlerden kalanları anarım / Bir araya gelince hoş sessiz düşünceler”. And yet, as Adam Watt, author of The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust, has noted, the title sits somewhat uneasily with the very essence of Proust’s artistic vision. For Proust’s world does not rely upon conscious recollection; rather, it is shaped by those involuntary, sensual impressions that, quite unexpectedly, summon the past into vivid presence. Such is the case in the celebrated “madeleine” episode, so delicately brought into Turkish by Roza Hakmen, where a taste, a fragrance, a fleeting sensation conjures an entire vanished world into being. He writes: “...just as in those Japanese games where a few scraps of paper, dropped into a porcelain bowl of water, suddenly unfurl, take shape, deepen in colour and become flowers, houses, and people—so too did all the flowers in our garden, and in M. Swann’s park, the water-lilies on the Vivonne, the kindly villagers and their little dwellings, the church, the whole of Combray and its surroundings—all rise up and take form, emerging, with their gardens, from my cup of tea”.
What we witness, then, is not a deliberate recollection, but a journey into the past made possible through the creative power of memory—a past not retrieved but reawakened, reanimated by the mysterious alchemy of the senses.
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| C. K. Scott-Moncrieff by Edward Stanley Mercer (© Scottish National Portrait Gallery) |
I have no intention of dipping my own madeleine into tea and naïvely expecting miracles. Yet I hold firmly to the belief that such miracles may indeed be awakened by other, parallel sensations—and that by following in the footsteps of a writer who himself believed in this possibility, we may unlock the sealed truths of our own lives. Was it not in this same spirit that Proust, inspired by his beloved Ruskin, sought out the very cathedrals his master had visited, listening for the echoes of his soul within their stone, writing of what he heard so that others might hear it too? And did he not, at last, achieve his aim by fashioning his own work into a structure as vast and intricate as any cathedral?
It is at just this moment that I catch sight, from the train, of the twin spires of Chartres Cathedral rising in the distance. Proust, I recall, saw in those asymmetrical towers—differing in style and proportion—a symbol of solitude and separation: feelings I know only too well. When he passed through Chartres with his family, he too would gaze upon the cathedral while changing trains. And so did we, making use of our own brief half-hour in Chartres to do the same. The vision reminded me, simultaneously, of the Martinville episode in the novel, and the Lala Mustafa Pasha Mosque in Famagusta—a memory as delicate and surprising as the fragrance of steeped tea.
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| Lala Mustafa Pasha Mosque in Famagusta (photo © Emre Aracı) |
One cannot help but wonder—how might Ruskin or Proust have described that eclectic mosque in Cyprus, its single minaret rising from the remains of a fourteenth-century Gothic cathedral? What poetry might they have found in its transformation, its layered identity, its silence steeped in centuries of devotion and change? Even Chartres, of course, has not remained untouched by time. Around the cathedral now stand out such establishments as Pacha Kebab and Le Khédive Bar, their names catching the eye with all the subtlety of a neon sign. And what of the train that was to take us on the final leg of our journey? It bore the name “Courtalain Express”. I could not resist asking, in the midst of the French countryside, “Did you say… the Kurtalan Ekspresi?” — the train that travels from Kurtalan, in eastern Turkey, to the legendary Haydarpaşa Station in Istanbul.
At last we alight at Illiers-Combray. There is something curiously familiar about the little station building, and the name of the town boldly printed in black capital letters against a white background above the façade—something that calls to mind the historic Suadiye railway station of my Istanbul childhood. The station master, perhaps sensing that we have descended from some distant planet, watches our hesitant, wide-eyed glances with gentle amusement. Then, quite suddenly, he rushes over, a small map in hand. How intuitively he has guessed that we are searching for Tante Léonie’s house!
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| Stéphane Heuet's dedicated volume of In Search of Lost Time to Emre Aracı |
But he does not know that Proust had long since placed this map before me. Nor can he guess that Stéphane Heuet had already etched these streets into my memory through his charming graphic adaptation of Proust’s world. I had even corresponded with Heuet, who had delighted me with the news that his illustrated version of À la recherche du temps perdu would soon appear in Turkish. And yet, though more than a year has passed, the promised Turkish edition has—regrettably—still not materialised, (Yapı Kredi Publishing House would eventually begin publishing Stéphane Heuet’s Proust adaptations in Turkish in 2014).
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| Stéphane Heuet's charming adaptation of À la recherche du temps perdu |
“Combray at sunset, habit, the goodnight kiss, Françoise, the madeleine dipped in lime-blossom tea, Aunt Léonie, the church, Uncle Adolphe, the lady in pink, reading in the garden, hawthorns, moonlit walks, the solitude of autumn, the birth of desire, Balbec, the room fragrant with lilies, the Verdurins and their circle, Swann’s encounter with Odette, Vinteuil’s sonata, Swann’s love, chrysanthemums, jealousy, lies, waiting, the language of music, snowy days on the Champs-Élysées, Gilberte, disillusionment, hope...”.
Each fragment a pearl on the thread of memory, shimmering with the light of lost time. But then, as we reached the deserted town square, the dream dissolved into something altogether more jarring. The hushed poetry of memory was abruptly displaced by a coarse, monotonous bass line—more drill than music—that seemed to pierce the spirit like a blunt instrument. A group of idle young men, crammed into a small car, were circling the square with loud bravado, spinning their tyres and revving their engines as though the village were their private theatre. Had Proust encountered them, I have no doubt he would have found a place for them in his novel—just as he once immortalised the gang of girls at Balbec.
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| Church of Saint-Jacques (photo © Emre Aracı) |
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| Emre Aracı at the garden entrance to Tante Léonie’s house (photo © Bilge Aracı) |
At last, at two o’clock in the afternoon, Tante Léonie’s house opened its doors to visitors. Passing through the little gate with its tinkling bell, and walking down the chestnut-lined path, I felt myself approaching that garden—yes, that garden—not simply in space but in spirit. Though I had no connection to this geography or topography, I found myself in the very place I had imagined through Proust’s prose, through the drawings of Stéphane Heuet, through Bernard Lamotte’s dusky canvases where a lone yellow light glows from a window at evening. It was the garden of my own childhood too, where similar joys and fears, excitements and anxieties had once stirred my soul.
And then I thought of Albert Camus, and his quietly haunting words: “From my own experience, I know that a man’s life is nothing more than a long journey to rediscover, through the winding paths of art, those two or three powerful images in whose presence his heart first opened”. Literature, wherever it is born, can indeed defy time in precisely this way—taking us by the hand through all its labyrinths, back to where we truly began. The house known in the novel as Tante Léonie’s was, in reality, once the residence of Proust’s aunt and uncle, Elisabeth and Jules Amiot. On his father’s side, Proust’s family roots in Illiers stretch back as far as the sixteenth century. From the age of six, the young Marcel spent five consecutive summers here. Yet the very richness of the flora—the abundance of trees and flowering plants—became an enemy to his fragile health; his frequent asthma attacks prevented him from ever returning. Indeed, following the funeral of his aunt in 1886, Proust never set foot in Illiers again.
Jules Amiot remained in the house after his wife’s death, living there until his own passing in 1912, after which the property was sold. In 1954, Elisabeth’s granddaughter, Germaine Amiot, repurchased the house and, in 1976, generously donated it to the Société des Amis de Marcel Proust et de Combray, founded in 1947. And so it was that Tante Léonie’s house—one of the most vital and evocative settings in À la recherche du temps perdu, rendered immortal through literature—was preserved, stone and soil alike, from the threat of oblivion.
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| Tante Léonie’s house (photo © Emre Aracı) |
The three-storey home has since been restored, as faithfully as possible, to its former state, guided by Proust’s prose and the few extant photographs. In the garden, the first thing to catch my eye was, rather unexpectedly, a structure that had been converted into a greenhouse but was once known as a Turkish bath. The English guidebook I carried referred to it, quaintly, as just that: a “Turkish bath”. Its red and cream brickwork, its arched window framed with an orientalist border that strangely echoed the monumental quay gate of the Çırağan Palace in Istanbul, reminded me of the oval windows of an old English Pullman carriage I had once seen at Folkestone West Station. There, bathed in moonlight, its signal lamp glowing like an oil lantern, the carriage had stood still at the edge of the platform—its polished surface reflecting another world.
Eager to explore the house before the arrival of a large tour group, I stepped inside. The dining room, clad in wooden panelling, held ceramic plates on the wall, an old clock, and a hearth. Proust, in the preface to his translation of Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies, recalls this very room—writing that, during the long hours he spent reading there, its objects would speak to him without waiting for replies, and he regarded them as companions.
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| Abdülhak Şinasi Hisar |
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| Bernard Lamotte’s tender evocations of young Marcel |
Looking at the madeleine and the carefully arranged scene, one begins, quite naturally, to see beyond them—towards another realm entirely. And it is precisely this shift, this movement from the literal to the ineffable, that transforms an otherwise ordinary provincial house—no different, perhaps, from countless others scattered across the French countryside—into a threshold through which one glimpses the boundless world of one’s own consciousness. In that moment, lines from Abdülhak Şinasi Hisar come softly to mind: “At such times, my eyes turned inwards. I would return to my own country, my own world, where I rediscovered my freedom and my sincerity. The fountains of imagination would burst open within me, my fancies would rush forth, and body and soul alike would be flooded with poetry. I felt the intimate pleasures of my being overflowing, spreading wide their wings; I knew I had been born for such moments. I could hear the promises and invitations that life had made to me beyond the span of my years. I was now in a dream more powerful than truth, in my own realm. I moved towards the pleasures, the splendours, the loves I knew life could offer, leaving childhood behind and entering a world of poetry. And I knew these beauties belonged only to the soul, and the soul alone was their equal”. Yes, that is where Proust leads us. And how quietly he does so.
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| No. 9 Boulevard Malesherbes (photo © Emre Aracı) |
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| Willie Heath by Paul Nadar |
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| The former station in Suadiye, Istanbul |
In some quiet chamber of the mind, a strange synthesis began to take shape: "Illiers-Suadiye".
An imagined topography, composed of reminiscence, reverie, and the gentle erosion of years—a place not quite real, and yet more enduring than the present, where the past lingers on, softly insistent in its refusal to vanish...
Emre Aracı’s article was originally published in Turkish under the title ‘Illiers-Combray’de Proust’un izinde bir gün’ in the January 2013 issue (No. 165) of Kitap-lık.
© Emre Aracı 2025. All rights reserved.
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