The Perfect Meal (8 page)

After that . . . well, I’ll let the American journalist Robert Forrest Wilson explain:

The croissant is of a crisp, flaky texture, and if one attempts to eat it dry, it explodes into flying fragments at every bite. It is, however, not eaten dry—it is dipped into coffee. It is not only good form in Paris to dip one’s croissant but practically necessary. It is a bun specialized for dipping.

Since 1924, when that was written, the croissant has undergone even further refinement in the interest of avoiding crumbs. The fashionable choice in breakfast breads these days is a croissant filled with a paste of . . . yes, that’s right: almonds.

I once tried to persuade my father to widen his horizons by baking some madeleines for the shop. He was busy making Lamingtons, an Australian favorite, beloved of pastry cooks, as they use up stale pound cake. Cut into blocks, the cake is dunked in chocolate syrup and then rolled in desiccated coconut.

“What’s a madeleine?” he said. “I’ve never heard of them.”

“Here’s the recipe.” I showed him the passage laboriously translated from the
Larousse Gastronomique
.

He wiped his hands on his apron and took the slip of paper but read only as far as the ingredients.

“Ground almonds! You know what they cost? You want me to go broke?”

After I moved to Paris, I made a point of sampling every kind of French pastry. Some took a little more effort than others. Maybe it was my Catholic upbringing, but I always felt furtive biting into the caramel-frosted cream-filled puff known as the
pette de nonne
—nun’s fart.

A Nun’s Fart

But I was soon converted to the moist, lemony
financier
; and as for
macarons
, vividly colored, and flavored with lemon, raspberry, chocolate, caramel, or passion fruit, I had to agree with the cook who wrote, “
Ils sont irrésistibles, avec leur petite coque craquante et leur intérieur fondant
”—“They are irresistible, with their little crunchy shell and their melting interior.”

Above all, I remained steadfast in my devotion to the madeleine, though not solely for culinary reasons. How many cakes could be said to have inspired a literary masterpiece?

L
ate in the summer, I asked Louise, “Would you like to take a trip to Illiers?”

“Of course. Love to.”

A year earlier, such a question would have earned a glare and a muttered “I’m busy.” But whatever demon seizes children at fifteen, transforming them overnight into sullen monsters, had just as suddenly relinquished her, leaving behind a sunny and bright young woman.

She even crawled out of bed at 7:00 a.m. for the two-hour train trip. We were early enough at Gare Montparnasse to snatch some coffee in a deserted café and share a blueberry muffin, fending off a trio of bold sparrows—
piafs
in French slang—that scavenged crumbs right off the table. In tribute to their size and fearlessness, Edith Gassion, a small and feisty street singer of the 1930s, with a poignantly piercing voice, rechristened herself Edith Piaf—although her choice was ironic: sparrows can’t sing.

An hour later, our TGV was gliding across the plains of La Beauce—the Bread Basket. The Beauce is Kansas with a French accent. A few weeks before, we’d have looked out on amber waves of grain. Now the fields were stubble, their wheat stored in the silos that, as in Kansas, loomed next to every station. Over the landscape lay the lassitude that follows the harvest. Slowing into towns, we glimpsed empty streets, shuttered houses, shops with blinds drawn, and dogs drowsing under chestnut trees.

Switching on my Kindle tablet, I clicked to the text downloaded the night before:
Du côté de Chez Swann
(
Swann’s Way
), the first volume of Proust’s
À la Recherche du Temps Perdu
.

“
Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure . . .”
—“For a long time, I used to go to bed early . . .”

I first read those lines as a teenager, in the stifling heat of an Australian country town, hunched over the book on a verandah with the
rush rush
of cicadas in my ears and the fronds of a pepper tree rattling on the tin roof.

Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say “I’m going to sleep.” And half an hour later the thought that it was time to go to sleep would awaken me; I would try to put away the book which, I imagined, was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; I had been thinking all the time, while I was asleep, of what I had just been reading, but my thoughts had run into a channel of their own, until I myself seemed actually to have become the subject of my book.

I knew that feeling! Drowsing over a book, I’d wake with a start, thinking I was still reading—then realize I’d invented that next part in my sleep, the writer in me taking over like an automatic pilot in an aircraft.

I held out the Kindle to Louise. “I downloaded
Du Côté de Chez Swann
, if you want to read about Illiers.”

“It’s all right,” she said. “We did it at school.” Making a pillow of her coat, she folded her arms and closed her eyes. “Wake me when we get there.”

A
t Chartres, we transferred to a two-carriage train with cars hardly larger than those of the Paris Metro. Three girls boarded at the last minute, hauling bicycles. Otherwise, we were the only passengers. And once we left the station, the rusted rails running alongside showed that only a single line was in use. We were truly leaving civilization behind.

I kept browsing through
Du Côté de Chez Swann
, losing myself in its long, unwinding sentences.

The French, initially, didn’t get Proust. One editor grumbled, “I just don’t understand why a man should take thirty pages to describe how he rolls about in bed before he goes to sleep.” Publishers doubted anyone could recall every detail of events that took place thirty years ago and scoffed even more when Proust explained the prosaic event that unlocked this ability: the taste of tea into which he’d dunked a few crumbs from a madeleine.

I skimmed through the text to that passage.

And suddenly the memory returns. The taste was that of the little crumb of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before church-time), when I went to say good day to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of real or of lime-flower tea.

Was it my childhood as a baker’s son that made this image so poignant? I looked at Louise, drowsing opposite. Already an accomplished cook, she was particularly skillful with pastry and cakes. Maybe there really were things that “ran in the family.”

T
wo hours after leaving Paris, our little train subsided to an exhausted halt at Illiers. We climbed out into the sun. There wasn’t even a platform—just a stretch of asphalt and the unmanned station. Across the tracks, beyond a field of weeds, some derelict brick buildings slumped, apparently held up by the vines that wreathed them. The flat crack of a shotgun carried across the fields: hunters out for rabbits in the stubble. Otherwise, there was no sound at all.

We walked through the deserted station into the sunny square in front.

In 1971, the locals thought enough of Proust to rename the town Illiers/Combray, incorporating his fictional name for the community, but after that, their enthusiasm waned. A statue might have been asking too much, but they could at least have erected a sign: “Hometown of Marcel Proust.”

Instead, the square was dominated by an obelisk commemorating the dead of the 1914–18 war. Perched on the top, a bronze rooster, the
coq Gallois
, symbolized France’s cocky fighting spirit. It was a silent statement of relative values. Literature was all very well, it told us, but national pride, what the French called
la gloire
(glory) came first.

Heavy chains attached to empty shell casings fenced off the memorial. On one of these, facing the monument, perched the only living thing in sight, a gray pigeon. It didn’t fly off as we approached. Rather, it appeared to be in rapt contemplation of the rooster on top of the obelisk.

“Maybe it lost someone,” Louise said. “One of those pigeons that carried messages.”

A single tree-lined avenue out of the square suggested a route into town, so we took it. When I looked back, the pigeon still hadn’t moved.

Thirty minutes later, at a table on the deserted central square, Louise sipped an
eau à la menthe
and I drank a beer. We had seemed to be the only strangers in town until an English family colonized the next table. After ordering a single coffee, mother, father, and both children disappeared, one after the other, into the dark interior.

“That toilet must be the most popular spot in town,” I said.

“At least it’s
open
.”

Illiers certainly presented no threat to Disneyland. Everything except the café and the church was shut. This included the sparse one-room visitors’ center, where a stony-faced lady handed us a map, and the former home of Proust’s great-aunt, now a museum. We’d arrived there at midday, to be told by the lone
gardienne
that it was about to close for lunch.

“When do you reopen?”

“Two thirty,” she said, with a look that suggested I’d asked a silly question.

Two and a half hours for lunch? This was so excessive that I recognized the statement of principles behind it. This Marcel Proust was only a
writer
, people! Nobody really
important
. Opposite, a bakery advertised itself as “where Tante Léonie bought her madeleines.” It, too, was closed, with blinds pulled down and no suggestion they would ever rise again.

“To live in Combray,” Proust wrote, “was a trifle depressing.” I could see why. As Luke Skywalker complains of his home planet in
Star Wars
, “If there is a bright center to the universe, this is the place furthest from it.”

For two hours, we explored anyway. Illiers had been modestly prosperous once, but those days were gone. Shutters had been up for decades at the
bains-douches municipaux
, where, in the days before home plumbing, one could take a weekly bath. Nor were there any women at the public laundry where wives and housekeepers once knelt around the communal pond, gossiping as they pounded their clothes clean.

At 2:30 sharp, the
gardienne
at the house of Tante Léonie, more cheerful after her lunch, unlocked its black metal gates.

The little house had barely changed since Proust lived here between the ages of six and nine, at the end of the 1870s. In the kitchen, simple country pots and pans covered the table. Climbing the narrow, winding wooden stairs, we dipped our heads to pass through low doors, smiled at the narrow beds, the flowered wallpaper, the faded oil paintings—all just as Proust describes. Only the attic was different. It now contained a photo gallery of Marcel’s family and friends, a menagerie of bushy beards, extravagant hats, and men in stiff collars glaring at the camera. If you smiled in those days of long exposures, it tended to come out as a ghastly grin.

Finally, we stepped into Léonie’s bedroom. On the table next to her bed, in a glass case, like holy relics, sat a white ceramic teapot; a cup, saucer, and spoon; a dish of dried lime leaves; a bottle of Vichy-Célestins mineral water; and a delicately fluted madeleine.

As I stood in reverent contemplation, Louise pointed to the mineral water.

“Vichy-Célestins. The kind
mamine
likes.”

She was right. Her grandmother—my mother-in-law, Claudine—shared an older person’s preference for fizzy mineral water. And both slept in almost identical beds, in the Second Empire style, with the same scroll-backed wooden headboards.

It surprised me how serious an interest Louise took in the house. Confident I knew everything of importance about Proust, I’d refused the sheaf of documentation offered by the
gardienne
, but she’d accepted one. She referred to it as we walked around, quoting what Proust wrote about the wallpaper, a painting, the orangerie, no bigger than one of the bedrooms, at the bottom of the small garden. Louise had grown up with Proust and “done” him at school. As part of her
patrimoine
—her cultural heritage—he was worthy of respect, like Balzac, Zola, Gide.

My appreciation was different. I was a fan. For me, the visit was sacramental, akin to taking the waters at Lourdes. It was enough for me to sniff the air, smell the dust, stand in the little garden and look up at the windows through which he’d gazed a century and a half ago.
He had been here
.