The place names Paris, Illiers, Cabourg and Venice occupy a central position both in Proust’s life and in his novel. Yet Proust’s own concrete experiences of his youth, for example in the village of Illiers or at the seaside hotel in Cabourg, serve merely as external stimuli which, in the novel, are transformed into settings for the subjective world of experience of the first-person narrator, such as the mythical childhood world of Combray or the Balbec of dreams and disappointments.
The difference in meaning created by this deliberate transformation of names and places frees the work from the limitations of a mere memoir or historical document. It shifts the emphasis from external geographical coordinates to the inner geography of the human mind, in which places do not exist as such but are continually reconstructed through expectations, the passage of time and involuntary memory. Proust himself stressed that the task of literature is not merely to reproduce external reality, but to apprehend the inner, subjective reality constructed by the human mind and memory on the basis of sensory perception.
Proust’s novel sequence In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu) covers the period from the late 1870s to the years following the First World War, extending into the 1920s. The greater part of the novel’s events takes place during the Belle Époque (1871–1914). The novel portrays the narrator’s childhood nostalgically, but also offers an ironic depiction of the society of the period: the aristocracy and the arriviste bourgeoisie, their salons and their cultural life. The novel is not, however, a historical or memoiristic work, but autobiographical fiction, or autofiction, in which reality and imagination are intertwined.
The period was also an age of industrial revolution. The automobile, railway travel, electricity and the telephone significantly improved the quality of life and made everyday life easier. In 1900 there were only around 3,000 automobiles on the roads of France, but by 1913 the number had risen to approximately 100,000. The modern world—the telephone, electric lighting, the bicycle, the automobile, the telegraph, the lift and even the aeroplane—all find their way into Proust’s novel.1 Yet the turn of the century was an experience of contradictions: despite technological progress, dialects were still spoken in France and wooden clogs were still worn.2
Landscapes of Childhood
Proust was born on 10 July 1871 at 96, rue La Fontaine in Auteuil. In 1873 the family moved to 9, boulevard Malesherbes, where Proust spent part of his childhood. Later he lived at 45, rue de Courcelles and, from 1906 onwards, at 102, boulevard Haussmann. These addresses correspond to different stages of Proust’s life: his childhood, the social circles of his youth and his later work as a writer. Taken together on a map, they form an important part of the world in which Proust lived.3
The most important place for play outside the home during Proust’s childhood was the Champs-Élysées gardens, where he met, among others, Antoinette Faure (1871–1950), the daughter of Félix Faure, the future President of France, and Marie de Bénardaky almost daily. It was a children’s world, but at the same time a carefully ordered miniature of adult society: children arrived with their nurses, played and watched puppet shows (guignol).4 In the novel, the same garden is transformed into the place where Gilberte and the narrator meet.
Proust’s Combray is partly based on Illiers, the home of his father’s family, but it is a literary reconstruction of the place. The church of Saint-Hilaire in Combray corresponds to the real Saint-Jacques church in Illiers, Aunt Léonie’s house to that of Jules and Élisabeth Amiot, and Swann’s park to Le Pré Catelan in Illiers. Méséglise and the Guermantes direction are likewise connected with real places, but Proust altered their locations and their relationships to one another. The Loir river of the real Illiers becomes the Vivonne in the novel. For Proust, the church tower was the spiritual and visual anchor of Combray. On the fictional map, the Méséglise and Guermantes areas are depicted on radically opposite sides because, for the narrator’s family, they represented two mutually exclusive worlds.
In Illiers, Proust spent his childhood holidays with his father’s family, and it was precisely from experiences formed in the gardens of Illiers and Auteuil that he later drew material for his literary work. The Combray of the novel is filled with quiet beauty and poetic everyday life: church bells, gardens, walks in Swann’s park, and reading with the grandmother. The novel’s description of the church towers of Martinville is likewise a literary variation on a real landscape. Illiers was therefore not only a beloved childhood environment for Proust, but also the place from which some of his earliest childhood memories originated. Aunt Léonie, too, borrowed certain of her characteristics from Élisabeth Amiot (née Proust), who lived in Illiers and was the elder sister of Proust’s father, Adrien Proust.5
Proust's Paris
Proust’s Paris was at once both old and new. It represented the world of the affluent bourgeoisie and the upper classes, where traditional dinners, champagne parties, elegant clothes and social gatherings were part of everyday life, while at the same time something new was constantly happening all around. Some 50 million visitors came to the Paris Exposition of 1900, which had 83,000 exhibitors and approximately 350,000 electric lamps. Electricity had become a visible symbol of progress: it was believed to enhance both the quality of life and life expectancy.6
For Proust, Paris was a city in which different social and cultural worlds existed side by side: aristocratic salons, artistic circles, theatres and opera houses, boulevards, cafés, restaurants and the social world of the Bois de Boulogne. People did not go to salons merely to be seen: they listened to musical performances, discussed plays and paintings, debated the controversies of the day and exchanged gossip. Proust’s Paris was shaped above all by who was invited where, with whom one socialised, how one dressed and what kinds of conversations took place.7
In the Bois de Boulogne, the different strata of the Parisian elite came together: wealthy and demi-mondaine ladies in carriages, gentlemen on horseback greeting those they encountered. A particularly important place for being seen was the allée des Acacias, known in fashionable society as la Bichonne, a promenade where Parisian society gathered every day at around four o’clock. Here, what mattered above all was social display: dress, company and presence were all used to emphasise one’s position within the hierarchy of fashionable society.8
The Longchamp races provide an even clearer example. Through her husband, who belonged to the Jockey Club, Laure de Chevigné was a regular presence in the La tribune des Dames. Admission to the enclosure was itself a marker of social status: not everyone was welcomed there on equal terms. Geneviève Straus, who was not an aristocrat, could enter the same enclosure only as an occasional guest. At Longchamp too, social life became a performance in which dress, horse racing, gender and social status were intertwined.9
The Faubourg Saint-Germain was the world of the old aristocracy, salons and inherited social status. Geographically, it was an aristocratic stronghold on the Left Bank of the Seine, which the old nobility had occupied since the ancien régime. A saying quoted by Weber neatly summed up the distinction: “Faubourg Saint-Germain is nobility, Faubourg Saint-Honoré is wealth.”10
The world Proust knew, however, was concentrated on the Right Bank of the Seine, roughly in the area between the Boulevard de Courcelles and the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. It was here, for example, that the salons of Mme de Chevigné, Mme Straus and Mme de Greffulhe were located. In Proust’s novel, however, these two levels become intermingled and merge into a single fictional world of the Faubourg.11
Montmartre may therefore be seen as the antithesis of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, although in reality people moved between these two worlds. In the late nineteenth century, the Faubourg was the world of the old aristocracy, salons and inherited status; Montmartre, by contrast, was the realm of artists, chansonniers, cafés and a burgeoning entertainment industry. Hewitt describes Montmartre as a space in which high and popular culture mingled and overlapped.
A wealthy, fashionable crowd enjoying an evening party in the gardens of the Le Pré-Catelan restaurant in Paris. Gervex, Henri, An Evening at Pré Catelan (1909). Oil on canvas, 217 x 318 cm. Musée Carnavalet, Paris (Une soirée mondaine au restaurant ”le Pré Catelan”). Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.
Le Chat Noir, Le Mirliton, Moulin de la Galette and Moulin Rouge formed a network in which poets, musicians, visual artists, actors, bohemians and curious members of fashionable society encountered one another.12 The studio of Madeleine Lemaire likewise provided an example of the mingling of different social worlds: artists and writers gathered there, and on occasion actors, composers and other prominent cultural figures might all happen to be present on the same evening.13
Proust also sought journalistic material in fashionable society. His report on a party organised by Robert de Montesquiou at Versailles on 30 May 1894 was published in Le Gaulois on 31 May under the title “Une fête littéraire à Versailles”. During the evening, Proust had noted above all the guests’ choice of dress. The following day, he complained to Montesquiou that the editors had removed several descriptions of clothing from his article.14
The society press turned such events into public spectacles. A single evening was transformed into a catalogue of names, clothes, artists and social connections. Sarah Bernhardt, Jeanne Bartet and other actresses performed; the Comtesse Greffulhe was among those present, while Proust observed how artists and aristocrats presented themselves to one another. He was no longer merely a guest, but also a journalist who transformed the occasion into a social spectacle in his article.15
The fashionable press of the period (Le Figaro, Le Gaulois), for which Proust wrote articles, played a role in constructing the public image of high society: their appearances at charitable bazaars, horse races and private gatherings were carefully reported in the society columns, which commented on their clothes, carriages, horses and hats.16
At the opera, this theatrical quality assumed a particularly distinctive form. As a young man, Proust attended many of Paris’s theatres and opera houses: in 1888 he saw Jules Massenet’s Cendrillon at the Théâtre du Châtelet, Athalie at the Théâtre de l’Odéon, Pied de mouton at the Éden-Théâtre and Ambroise Thomas’s Mignon at the Théâtre du Vaudeville. Later, the Paris Opera (Palais Garnier, Opéra Garnier) became one of the central stages of his world. In May 1895 he was particularly enthusiastic about a new production of Tannhäuser. The social reality of the opera house could sometimes be at least as interesting as the performance itself. Members of the audience might arrive late and leave before the end in order to meet acquaintances in the boxes, where they could be seen and maintain their social contacts.17
Proust’s dinners at the Ritz could be substantial cultural events. The programme for one evening included a Fauré sonata, Nocturne and Berceuse, Beethoven’s Andante, Schumann’s fantasy pieces, a Chopin prelude, Wagner’s Isolde’s Death and the overture to Die Meistersinger, as well as works by Couperin and Chabrier. At the Ritz dinner Proust organised in honour of Anna de Noailles in 1907, the dishes and wines were selected by his friend the Duc de Guiche. Proust wrote cheerfully to Robert de Billy: “Guiche had chosen the menu and the wines; unfortunately, I was the one who paid for them!” The dinner eventually cost Proust 2,700 francs. The luxurious dinner was therefore also a social occasion: food, music, conversation, guests and the host’s ability to conduct the discussion formed an indivisible whole.18
Café Weber and Larue belonged to Proust’s Paris as a young adult; later, the Ritz joined them. In 1917 Proust began visiting the Ritz increasingly often as a guest of Princess Hélène Soutzo and held dinners of his own there. For Proust, the Ritz became a kind of observatory of social life and a source of material for his novel. The hotel combined American-style comfort, Louis XVI style, high-quality service and social interaction. During the war it was almost a world unto itself: while the rest of Paris was living under exceptional conditions, at the Ritz one could dine late and well, meet people and exchange news. Proust could sit at dinners in the midst of fashionable society, direct the conversation, tell anecdotes and listen to the stories of others.19
Cabourg and Venice
Cabourg became another important part of Proust’s world. Proust drew features of several other seaside resorts in Normandy and Brittany into his fictional Balbec. The hotel in Cabourg (Le Grand Hôtel de Cabourg) was presented as a marvel of modern tourism: it had a 150-metre-long sea-facing façade, a restaurant on the seafront, salon games, a theatre and a casino. Le Figaro declared that the hotel aspired to be “at the forefront of progress” (à la tête du mouvement) and to offer its guests all the latest comforts. It was even compared to a palace from The Thousand and One Nights.
The menu served on the hotel’s opening day makes this world almost tangible. At a celebratory dinner for 150 guests on 7 July 1907, the dishes included Houdan chicken with Grand-Hôtel sauce, grilled Chateaubriand with béarnaise sauce, new potatoes and soufflé à la Napolitaine. These dishes did not appear on the menu of the Grand-Hôtel de Balbec, but the article in Le Figaro gives an indication of the kind of luxury Proust encountered around him at precisely the time when he began drafting the first versions of his novel.20
The social life of Cabourg can be seen even more clearly in newspaper reports from 1908. According to Le Figaro, the digue, or seafront promenade in front of the Grand Hôtel, was every day a gathering place for the most elegant members of society. Summer was the peak of the tourist season. In its society column of 17 August, the newspaper included among those observed there Henri Bardac, the actresses Cécile Sorel and Lucy Gérard, and Marcel Proust. It is worth noting that the list of notable figures occupies more than half of the column space. The seafront promenade was thus at once a walking route, a grandstand for fashionable society and a place where people could see and be seen.21
Proust himself saw something enchantingly beautiful in this culture of display. He recounts meeting Lucy Gérard on the Cabourg seafront one evening: the actress’s entirely pink dress stood out so strikingly against the orange sunset that Proust remained for a long time watching her. The social stage of the promenade was transformed in an instant into colour and light. This small episode also illustrates how Proust drew from the life of fashionable society material that could later acquire a particular significance in the novel.22
In Cabourg, however, Proust did not merely observe holidaymakers. There was also time for playing polo. In a letter to Robert de Billy, he mentions having lost large sums of money at baccarat. He also made long automobile excursions into the Norman countryside. The automobile transformed the experience of landscape and time: time seemed to accelerate and the perspective to change. From a coastal town, one could quickly reach churches, castles and villages, which appeared as a succession of impressions. The automobile journeys Proust made with Agostinelli also gave rise to the article Impressions de route en automobile, published in Le Figaro. Here, old and new meet: at night, Agostinelli illuminated the façade of Lisieux Cathedral with the car’s headlights, making the old medieval building appear “as if new”.23
It was precisely on the Normandy coast that the narrator of Proust’s novel encounters the cycling “little band of girls”. The bicycle transformed both the landscape and people’s behaviour. Its technology developed rapidly during the 1890s, bicycles became more affordable, and they freed women in particular from impractical conventions of dress. Cycling could also contribute to breaking down barriers between social classes: in Normandy, people from different backgrounds could encounter one another on roads and country lanes in ways for which the more rigid social life of Paris offered few opportunities. The bicycle thus came to be associated with youth and dynamism, in contrast to an older society bound by conventions.24
Venice is an exception in this topography because Proust actually travelled there as a writer, before he began writing the novel. He arrived in the city on 28 April 1900 and spent time there with Reynaldo Hahn and Marie Nordlinger. The journey was also a “Ruskinian pilgrimage”, during which Proust, together with his mother, Reynaldo Hahn and Marie Nordlinger, followed in Ruskin’s footsteps, visiting the churches, palaces and monuments he had described. Venice was therefore a real place for Proust from the outset, but one already saturated with art and literature.25 In Time Regained, Venice and its uneven cobblestones, like Combray and all the experiences of childhood, suddenly return to the narrator’s mind when he stumbles on the paving stones in front of the Guermantes’ mansion. Art could thus preserve something of the past that could later be recovered through memory.26
The map of In Search of Lost Time is ultimately a map of time. The Champs-Élysées represents the world of childhood and the encounter with Gilberte; the Bois de Boulogne and Longchamp the culture of social display and status; the Faubourg Saint-Germain inherited privilege; Montmartre modern bohemian culture; the Parc Monceau the theatre of fashionable society and dress; Balbec youth, the sea and Albertine; 102 boulevard Haussmann the writer’s life of seclusion; the Ritz late social life and the gathering of observations for the book to come; and Venice the world of art and culture. The same city and the same landscapes acquire different meanings at different stages of life.
The map of the novel reveals what lies at the heart of it: the past cannot be restored as it was, but places, colours, tastes, sounds and events can serve as cues to memory, through which a past life can be reconstructed. Real and fictional places do not, therefore, always occupy the same map. It is also worth remembering that Proust’s Paris was above all a city of the upper classes and affluent bourgeoisie—the fashionable circles depicted in the novel represent only one, albeit for the writer a crucial, part of the society of the period. It is precisely in the space between real places and the world of the novel that life is transformed into literature.
Notes
1Watt, Adam, The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011,, 22-23.
2Kalifa, Dominique. The Belle Époque: A Cultural History, Paris and Beyond. Trans. Susan Emanuel. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021, 16; Kern, Stephen, The Culture of Time and Space. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003, 11,18,19,33,34,67-69.
3Musée Carnavalet, Marcel Proust: A Parisian Novel. Exhibition press kit. Paris: Paris Musées, 2021, 7-8,10,12,29.
4Diesbach, Ghislain de, Proust. Paris: Perrin, 1991, 50; Proust, Marcel, Lettres (1879-1922), eds. Françoise Leriche & Caroline Szylowicz. Paris: Plon, 2022, 69,1221; Berge, André, « Deux lettres ». Bulletin de la Société des Amis de Marcel Proust et des Amis de Combray, n° 7, 1957, 271-272; Clarac, P., et Ferré, A., Album Proust, Gallimard, 1965, 89-90.
5Proust, Marcel. À la recherche du temps perdu. Edited by Jean-Yves Tadié. 4 vols. Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 2019–2023, I, 46,177-178; Diesbach 1991, 32,36-37.
6Kalifa 2021, 25-26.
7Musée Carnavalet 2021, 24–29.
8Weber, Caroline, Proust’s Duchess: How Three Celebrated Women Captured the Imagination of Fin-de-Siècle Paris. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2018, 167.
9Ibid., 167-168.
10Ibid., 5n3.
11Diesbach 1991, 468; Musée Carnavalet 2021, 6.
12Hewitt, Nicholas, Montmartre: A Cultural History. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017, 22,35,37,39-40,64,69-71.
13Weber 2018, 519-520.
14Proust to Montesquiou, 31 May 1894, Lettres, 118 (46); Proust, Marcel, “Une fête littéraire à Versailles”. Le Gaulois, 31 May 1894.
15Ibid.
16Weber 2018, 6,172,206.
17Diesbach 1991, 476, Musée Carnavalet 2021, 13,24-25.
18Diesbach, 399.
19Ibid., 633-634.
20Nède, André, “Une brillante inauguration”, Le Figaro, 10 July 1907; Diesbach 1991, 400; Musée Carnavalet 2021, 26.
21“Le Monde & La Ville: Petit courrier de Cabourg”. Le Figaro, 17 August 1908, 4; Henri Bardac (1888–1951) belonged to the wealthy Parisian Bardac family and moved in Proust’s social circles; Cécile Sorel (1873–1966) was a well-known actress at the Comédie-Française; Lucy Gérard (1872–1941) was likewise a well-known actress whom Proust met in Cabourg in the summer of 1908.
22Proust to Louisa de Mornand, mid-August 1908. Lettres, 454 (245).
23Watt, 22–23; Musée Carnavalet 2021, 26–27; Proust to Robert de Billy, September–October 1907. Lettres, 410 (223).
24Watt, 22-23.
25Diesbach 1991, 276-279.
26RTP IV, 446.
Bibliography
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—. Lettres (1879-1922), eds. Françoise Leriche & Caroline Szylowicz. Paris: Plon, 2022.
—. “Une fête littéraire à Versailles”. Le Gaulois, 31 May 1894.
Watt, Adam, The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Weber, Caroline, Proust’s Duchess: How Three Celebrated Women Captured the Imagination of Fin-de-Siècle Paris. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2018.
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