The Catholic saturation of "Combray" is intense on Sundays. How did early readers read the pages devoted to the church, the curé's visit and his erudition on the church, the bad weather of Rogations and the conversation between Aunt Léonie and Françoise? We can find nothing on this subject, except in a letter from Proust in January 1914 showing thatMme Gaston de Caillavet, née Jeanne Pouquet, retained an account of "first communion"(Corr., XIII, 91, 97), which is actually absent from the book.
The Catholic themes of the first volume are reminiscent of Proust's Barrésian side. In 1919, he entitled a section of Pastiches et mélanges "En mémoire des églises assassinées" ("In memory of murdered churches"), i.e. the churches destroyed by the war, having been disaffected by anticlericalism. This 1919 section includes the article "La mort des cathédrales" ("The Death of Cathedrals"), published in 1904 when the law separating church and state was being drafted. In it, Proust appealed to the State to maintain Catholic rites(CSB, 141-149).
Invented by the Jesuits in the 18th century, the month of Mary did not become widespread in France until the Restoration and even before the July Monarchy. The first Italian books were translated from 1816 onwards, while the first mention in literature only appeared in May 1836. Linked to the Marian cult in France, the month of Mary was a great success in the 19th century. The references in "Combray" link Proust to the Catholicism of the popular missions, still very familiar in 1913. He knew that when he introduced the month of Marie into his novel, it was the month of communions and baptisms, during which people did not get married. The 1909 manuscript contains an ironic and explicit dialogue with hawthorns, in which the month of Marie is contrasted with republicanism.
Beyond the month of Marie and the hawthorns, the network of Catholic metaphors continues right to the end of "Combray". Madame de Guermantes' appearance in church for the wedding of Dr. Percepied's daughter is the last Catholic moment in this first part of Swann. In a sketch in Cahier 13, the duchess comes to the ceremony to "render the holy bread". This old pastoral custom is absent from the final text. In the Sunday lunch scene, however, we encounter "the blessed bread that also came familiarly from the church". A little further down, we read "a brioche because it was our turn to offer it"(RTP, I, 70). In a draft of this passage (Cahier 14), it does indeed come from the church. This sketch is repeated in 1910 in Cahier 30: "c'était le tour de notre banc." This "blessed brioche" is noted in the 1906 diary (January 3), later used by Proust as a notebook and auctioned at Christie's in Paris on April 29, 2013. Such a presence of the Catholic thread of blessed bread in draft notebooks allows us to reread differently the passage in "Combray" about lunch, where "a brioche larger than usual" is related to the bell tower "gilded and baked [...] like a larger blessed brioche"(RTP, I, 64).
