Word: proust
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...townsfolk are happy about Illiers' status as the center of a Proust cult. Until quite recently, many scorned the author as a homosexual, atheistic, hypochondriac aesthete. Also a very difficult writer. Even Mayor René Compère, 67, a pert little man who takes visitors on a lecture tour around the town, has yet to crack the gigantic set of Proust's works that is prominently displayed in his office. Compère argues that les Proustiens, as the literary-minded tourists are known, are not even good for business. Says the mayor: 'They come from...
Shell-Shaped Cakes. Certainly Combray forms only a small part of Proust's re-created world, the decadent, disintegrating world of elegance and fashion that was fin de siécle Paris society. But it is a most enchanting part, and a necessary beginning...
...called a madeleine. Ten years ago, the bubbly Mme. Benoist sold only four madeleines a week. "In the past three weeks," she says, "we've sold 1,000. We had to hire another apprentice." Many of those who buy the little cakes (at 12? apiece) are foreigners, for Proust's masterwork has been translated into 17 languages, including Finnish, Japanese and Serbo-Croatian. Mme. Benoist remarks: "If this keeps up, I'll have to learn English, German, Italian, and whatever it is that the Japanese and Chinese both speak...
Cultivated Hypochondria. It was the "petite madeleine," dunked in tea and then savored, that unlocked the corridors of Proust's memory. "No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate, than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place." So in Swann's Way, the first part of his seven-volume work, did Proust begin his remembrances. Soon the past was unfolding in his pages: "And once I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in her decoction...
...second floor is the bedroom where she cultivated her hypochondria to the point of becoming a bedridden invalid for 20 years. Later, her nephew emulated her example: writing feverishly at night (he practically existed on café au lait), sleeping during the day (with the aid of veronal), Proust rarely left his bed in a cork-lined Paris room during the last 15 years of his life. On Aunt Elisabeth's bedside table, gracing her tea saucer, is one of Mme. Benoist's madeleines, carefully wrapped in plastic and replaced every few days...