La Recherche à l’ombre d’Augustin Thierry Ou la magie de la mémoire toponymique

The “nominal reverie” of Proust’s Recherche is thrown into question by the plethora of “etymologies” that Brichot supplies for the Norman toponyms in Sodome et Gomorrhe. In reality, this archaeology of place names plunges the narrator into the “Merovingian night” of his childhood, as symbolized by the Combray church crypt, and whose poetry, according to Augustin Thierry, structures the two “sides” – aristocratic and bourgeois – of the “nation” that France forms – a bipolarity reactivated by the war of 1914–18.