Step into the house where it all began

In Illiers-Combray, in a house of pink stone with blue window frames, the young Marcel Proust spent his childhood holidays between 1877 and 1880. The house belonging to his paternal uncle and aunt, Jules and Élisabeth Amiot, became in his imagination the home of "aunt Léonie" — a central character of "Combray", the opening section of the first volume of In Search of Lost Time.

Converted into a museum in the late 1960s and opened to the public in 1972, the Maison de Tante Léonie is today a recognised "musée de France", fully renovated between 2022 and 2024. It welcomes thousands of visitors each year who rediscover there the places and scenes of the novel: the aunt's bedroom, the magic lantern, the dining room with its painted plates, and the gardens that Proust immortalised.

The Maison de Tante Léonie is "in some sense the best possible introduction to the novel one could imagine. You enter the house, you visit it, and you read In Search of Lost Time in the same breath, without stopping until Time Regained." — Antoine Compagnon