From Baalbek to Baghdad and beyond Marcel Proust's foreign memories of France.

A work of memory, Marcel Proust's novel is also a lieu de memoire, a testimonial of French culture. Yet, we must remember by what means strange it is. Indeed, we recall here a certain number of of the oriental aspects of the work like the 'semitic' traits friends and opponents found in its author, or like its hero, in perpetual exile, whose recollections make Normandy or Paris into fabulous Mediterranean and Persian cities. However, the Orient of La Recherche owes little to Orientalism: rather, it exhibits a desire to disorient Frenchnes to take its origins elsewhere. Proust, whose mode of expression critics often qualified as