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Illiers-Combray, young Proust's territory 

Published May 20, 2022
Updated Oct 27, 2022

📍 🇫🇷 Illiers-Combray, young Proust's territory

Proust’s words suffice here:

"Combray at a distance, from a twenty-mile radius, as we used to see it from the railway when we arrived there every year in Holy Week, was no more than a church epitomizing the town, representing it, speaking of it and for it to the horizon, and as one drew near, gathering close about its long, dark cloak, sheltering from the wind, on the open plain, as a shepherd gathers his sheep, the wooly gray backs of its flocking houses, which a fragment of its medieval ramparts enclosed, here and there, in an outline as scrupulously circular as that of a little town in a primitive painting...", wrote French novelist Marcel Proust (1871-1922) in "Swann’s Way".

And indeed, such a large, towering porch-bell tower - a sort of square-block rugby player that deprives an entire city-center of light and wind. A rampart all by itself, almost without decorative patterns.

____ Sources ____

>> Marcel Proust, “In Search of Lost Time”, 1913

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Theme:
City:
Illiers-Combray
Country:
France
Region:
Europe
Century:
20th CE