Let's continue our interpretation of the pillow in the second paragraph of "Combray". By associating this object with childhood and sensuality, Proust takes up a cliché from 19th-century poetry, for example in Baudelaire's "Le crépuscule du matin" and Sully Prudhomme's "En voyage", poems known to him. In the draft notebooks, as well as in the final text, the pillow is associated with curls to represent protection from the hostile world embodied in the great-uncle(RTP, I, 4). Later, the theme is taken up again in the evocation of the different rooms, where it is linked to the image of the nest, inspired by Michelet's L'Oiseau (1856)(RTP, I, 7). This curl-pillow-nest configuration is linked to eroticism, as suggested by the passage inAlbertine disparue where the narrator compares love to the fetishism of a child saying: "Mon cher petit lit, mon cher petit oreiller, mes chères petites aubépines"(RTP, IV, 78). We'll recall the hawthorn farewell scene in "Combray", part of which dates back to "Robert et le chevreau, Maman part en voyage", written in early 1908. During a pre-publication of the passage in 1912, its obscene and provocative dimension - reinforced in the final text by the reference to the "taste of a frangipane"(RTP, I, 112)- was not lost on Robert de Montesquiou(Corr., XI, 66). In Sodome et Gomorrhe I, the association of pillow and curls denounces homosexuality(RTP, III, 23). The pillow is again linked to Sodom in the longest sentence of the Recherche(RTP, III, 17), inspired, as Nathalie Mauriac Dyer and Yuji Murakami have shown, by a biblical exegesis by Ruskin in Sesame and the Lilies, translated by Proust himself (1906).
Representing childhood and sensuality, and overdetermined by various Christic and pederastic allusions, the pillow in "Combray" is as essential and more erotic an embracer of memories than the madeleine that follows it. Early readers were right to be astonished by the novel's shocking opening, especially as it was already oriented towards a certain sexuality in the second paragraph. This is developed in the fourth paragraph, which begins with the sentence "Sometimes, as Eve was born from an Adam's rib, a woman was born during my sleep from a false position of my thigh"(RTP, I, 4). The erotic dream described in this paragraph, which can be read as a rewriting of Baudelaire's "À une passante", was originally linked to the onanism scene(RTP, I, 156).
It is Cahier 5, dating from 1909. The reflection on solitary pleasure is interpolated in the fragment for the awakening. The comparison of the Virgin's sons used in this passage brings to mind the page in Michelet's L'Insecte devoted to the "formation of their beautiful autumn webs, so poetic, which are called the Virgin's sons". Let's not forget that the image of the Virgin's sons is also a 19th-century poetic cliché. By associating it with the trace of a spiral staircase, Proust scandalously blends the poetic and the trivial, the pure and the impure. The Virgin's sons, erased in the final text, appear later in connection with hawthorns and the month of May(RTP, I, 111). In the draft of this passage, they are consistently associated with the smell of hawthorn almonds. This leads us to conclude that Montesquiou wasn't such a bad critic of these pages.
