Jardin du Pré-Catelan

Not far from Illiers Combray city centre, by the River Loir, this romantic garden created in 1850 is a listed site in memory of the literary work of Marcel Proust.
It was listed on the Inventaire in 1997 and as a Historic Monument in 1999. Jules Amiot, the uncle of Marcel Proust, designed the garden.
It was around the age of 6, during the Easter and Summer holidays, that Marcel Proust first came to spend a few weeks in Illiers. He spent happy times in the home of his aunt, Elisabeth Amiot, sister of his father, and her husband Jules Amiot, the “horticulturist and cook uncle”. He will relive his childhood emotions when he makes Illiers-Combray the Combray in his book “Du côté de chez Swann”. “The lilac half concealed by the small tile house called house of the Archers, where the guardian was lodged, went higher than its gothic gable with their minaret pink. The spring nymphs would have seemed vulgar near the young houris keeping in this French garden the bright and pure tones of Persian miniatures”.