In Search of Lost Time, Volume I_ Swann's Way - Marcel Proust [87]
“There, Françoise,” my aunt would say, “didn’t I tell you that they must have gone the Guermantes way? Good gracious, they must be hungry! And your nice leg of mutton will be quite dried up now after all the hours it’s been waiting. What a time to come in! Well, and so you went the Guermantes way?”
“But, Léonie, I supposed you knew,” Mamma would answer. “I thought Françoise had seen us go out by the little gate through the kitchen-garden.”
For there were, in the environs of Combray, two “ways” which we used to take for our walks, and they were so diametrically opposed that we would actually leave the house by a different door according to the way we had chosen: the way towards Méséglise-la-Vineuse, which we called also “Swann’s way” because to get there one had to pass along the boundary of M. Swann’s estate, and the “Guermantes way.” Of Méséglise-la-Vineuse, to tell the truth, I never knew anything more than the “way,” and some strangers who used to come over on Sundays to take the air in Combray, people whom, this time, neither my aunt herself nor any of us “knew from Adam,” and whom we therefore assumed to be “people who must have come over from Méséglise.” As for Guermantes, I was to know it well enough one day, but that day had still to come; and, during the whole of my boyhood, if Méséglise was to me something as inaccessible as the horizon, which remained hidden from sight, however far one went, by the folds of a landscape which no longer bore the least resemblance to the country round Combray, Guermantes, on the other hand, meant no more than the ultimate goal, ideal rather than real, of the “Guermantes way,” a sort of abstract geographical term like the North Pole or the Equator or the Orient. And so to “take the Guermantes way” in order to get to Méséglise, or vice versa, would have seemed to me as nonsensical a proceeding as to turn to the east in order to reach the west. Since my father used always to speak of the “Méséglise way” as comprising the finest view of a plain that he knew anywhere, and of the “Guermantes way” as typical of river scenery, I had invested each of them, by conceiving them in this way as two distinct entities, with that cohesion, that unity which belong only to the figments of the mind; the smallest detail of either of them seemed to me a precious thing exemplifying the special excellence of the whole, while beside them, before one had reached the sacred soil of one or the other, the purely material paths amid which they were set down as the ideal view over a plain and the ideal river landscape, were no more worth the trouble of looking at than, to a keen playgoer and lover of dramatic art, are the little streets that run past the walls of a theatre. But above all I set between them, far more than the mere distance in miles that separated one from the other, the distance that there was between the two parts of my brain in which I used to think of them, one of those distances of the mind which not only keep things apart, but cut them off from one another and put them on different planes. And this distinction was rendered still more absolute because the habit we had of never going both ways on the same day, or in the course of the same walk, but the “Méséglise way” one time and the “Guermantes way” another, shut them off, so to speak, far apart from one another and unaware of each other’s existence, in the airtight compartments of separate afternoons.
When we had decided to go the Méséglise way we would start (without undue haste, and even if the sky were clouded over, since the walk was not very long and did not take us too far from home), as though we were not going anywhere in particular, from the front-door of my aunt’s house, which opened on to the Rue du Saint-Esprit. We would be greeted by the gunsmith, we would drop our letters into the box, we would tell Théodore, from Françoise, as we passed that she had run out of oil or coffee, and we would leave the town by the road which ran along the white fence of M. Swann’s park. Before reaching it we would be met on our way