Combray is also an imagined village in Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), a book which was strongly inspired by the village of his childhood, Illiers, which has now been renamed Illiers-Combray in his honor.
Recent Proust scholarship, however, has argued that Proust's descriptions of Combray owe as much to his uncle's home in Auteuil as to Illiers.
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Combray was Marcel Proust's name for the market town of Illiers, of which the vivid recreation opens his vast semi-autobiographical novel In Search of Lost Time.
He projected the transforming experience onto the narrator of Du côté de chez Swann, who describes himself as a boy reading the piece in the garden at Combray.