This month marks the centenary of the death of the French novelist Marcel Proust, an occasion for looking at how his work was influenced by his father’s Catholic faith. Although formal religious instruction ended for Proust with his First Communion at age 12, his À la Recherche du Temps Perdu (In Search of Lost Time) implies that Catholicism made a lasting impression.
One oft-recalled feature in that seven-volume novel is the episode of the madeleine, in which dipping a small sponge cake into his tea made childhood memories accessible for transformation into art. Another, almost as cherished by readers, is a magic lantern scene set in the narrator’s childhood about Geneviève de Brabant. She was a heroine of medieval fable described in The Golden Legend, a collection of saints’ lives; her morality tale about a virtuous wife falsely charged with infidelity incited the young Proust stringently to inspect his own conscience.
