The houses of Marcel Proust, Gustave Thuret and Hervé Bazin labeled “House of the Illustrious”

The place has retained all its charm: you enter through the garden where the astonishing ceramic figures of a gardener and a milkmaid, remade identically, stand proudly. Coloured earthenware frames the windows: a reminder of the Orient, which Uncle Jules, a very well-off local merchant, was fond of. He is also responsible for several paintings by orientalist painters in the house. Proust’s bedroom as a child has also been restored according to what the novel tells and what we know of the period. A magic lantern, as in the book, projects images of the legend of Geneviève de Brabant, and the staircase, which cruelly kept his mother away every evening, still exists. The dining room, which has remained “in its original state”, with its dark furniture, evokes the dinners where his parents received local notables or even… Charles Swann, a key character in several volumes of The research Throughout the rooms, aided by numerous memories and documents, we find the family atmosphere, both real and imagined.

On the top floor, archive films of witnesses of the writer are shown: André Maurois, François Mauriac among others. These images alternate with those of actors reading well-known passages from Marcel Proust’s work, in particular the famous scene of the madeleine dipped in tea, provoking memories of Aunt Léonie’s room.

The “modernized” pieces restore the biography and the network of friends of the writer, his sources of inspiration too, through paintings and portraits by the photographer Nadar. So much so that even those who have not read Proust will be able to appreciate the visit which brings very close this vanished world of arts and letters, at the time of the Belle Époque.