Charles Swann Combray, drawn from Illiers
Swann's Way
Combray is the village of the narrator's childhood, its church, hawthorn lanes and Sunday afternoons summoned back whole by the taste of a madeleine dipped in tea. It is here that the neighbour Charles Swann calls in the evenings, and here that the two directions of the family walks divide the child's whole imagined world. Proust built this lost paradise from the real Illiers, which now bears the double name Illiers-Combray.
Swann's Way
inspired by Combray, the narrator's childhood village, is fictional but famously modelled on Illiers, the Eure-et-Loir town where Proust spent boyhood holidays; the town renamed itself Illiers-Combray in his honour in 1971. It lies about 110 km south-west of Paris, outside the setting box, so it is marked as an excursion.
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Odette The Bois de Boulogne
Swann's Way
The Bois de Boulogne is where elegant Paris displays itself, and the narrator remembers Odette de Crécy sweeping along its walks, the object of Swann's helpless love before she becomes his wife. The park becomes a place of pure enchantment and, revisited late in the book, of loss, its old glamour faded. Odette moving through the acacias is one of the novel's fixed images of desire.
Swann's Way
explicit The Bois de Boulogne, and especially the Allée des Acacias where fashionable Paris strolls and drives, is named in the novel; the child watches Odette pass here in her finery. The pin marks the park on the western edge of the city.
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