How Proust Can Change Your Life

Bring the milk to the boil, add the chocolate broken in pieces, and let it melt gently, stirring the mixture with a wooden spoon. Whip the sugar with the yolk of the six eggs. Preheat the oven to 130° C

.

When the chocolate has completely melted, pour it over the eggs and the sugar, mix rapidly and energetically, then pass through a strainer

.

Pour out the liquid into little ramekins 8 cm in diameter, and put into the oven, in a bain-marie, for an hour. Leave to cool before serving

.

But once the recipe had yielded a delicious dessert, in between mouthfuls of Françoise’s chocolate mousse we might pause to ask whether this dish, and by extension the entire volume of La Cuisine retrouvée, really constituted an homage to Proust, or whether it was not in danger of encouraging the very sin he had warned his readers about—artistic idolatry. Though Proust might have welcomed in principle a cookbook based on his work, the question is what form he would have wished it to take. To accept his arguments about artistic idolatry would mean recognizing that the particular foods featured in his novel were irrelevant when compared to the spirit in which the food was considered, a transferable spirit owing nothing to the exact chocolate mousse Françoise had prepared, or the particular bouillabaisse Madame Verdurin had served at her table—and might be as relevant when approaching a bowl of muesli, a curry, or a paella.

The danger is that La Cuisine retrouvée will unwittingly throw us into depression the day we fail to find the right ingredients for a Proustian chocolate mousse or green bean salad, and are forced to eat a hamburger—which Proust never had a chance to write about.

It wouldn’t, of course, have been Marcel’s intention: a picture’s beauty does not depend on the things portrayed in it.

SYMPTOM NO. 5:

THAT WE ARE TEMPTED TO VISIT ILLIERS-COMBRAY

Traveling by car southwest of the cathedral town of Chartres, the view through the windshield is of a familiar northern European arable landscape. One could be anywhere, the only feature of note being a flatness to the earth which lends disproportionate significance to the occasional water tower or agricultural silo asserting itself on the horizon above the windshield wipers. The monotony is a welcome break from the effort of looking at interesting things, a time to rearrange the twisted accordion-shaped Michelin map before reaching the châteaux of the Loire, or to digest the sight of Chartres Cathedral with its clawlike flying buttresses and weather-worn bell towers. The smaller roads cut through villages whose houses are shuttered for a siesta that appears to last all day; even the petrol stations show no sign of life, their Elf flags flapping in a wind blowing in from across vast wheat fields. A Citroën makes an occasional hasty appearance in the rearview mirror, then overtakes with exaggerated impatience, as if speed were the only way to protest against the desperate monotony.

At the larger junctions, sitting innocuously among signs vainly asserting a speed limit of 90 and pointing the way to Tours and Le Mans, the motorist may notice a metal arrow indicating the distance to the small town of Illiers-Combray. For centuries, the sign pointed simply to Illiers, but in 1971 the town chose to let even the least cultured motorist know of its connection to its most famous son, or rather visitor. For it was here that Proust spent his summers from the age of six until nine and once again at the age of fifteen, in the house of his father’s sister, Élisabeth Amiot—and here that he drew inspiration for the creation of his fictional Combray.

There is something eerie about driving into a town that has surrendered part of its claim to independent reality in favor of a role fashioned for it by a novelist who once spent a few summers there as a boy in the late nineteenth century. But Illiers-Combray appears to relish the idea. In a corner of the rue du Docteur Proust, the patisserie-confiserie hangs a large, somewhat misleading sign outside its door:

T

HE HOUSE WHERE

A

UNT

L

ÉONIE USED TO BUY HER MADELEINES