30 MARCEL PROUST
Along the right-hand grass verge of the road, past a pre-
historic standing-stone, is an endless line of apple-trees, sur-
rounded in September by the red rings of fallen apples, and all
summer through by the circles of their shade: 'It was on the
Meseglise Way,' says the Narrator, 'that I first noticed the round
shadow which apple-trees cast on the sunlit ground.'! Later in
life Proust would drug himself for a week with veronal and
cafeine, in order to get up in the daytime and visit his favourite
trees in bloom on the outskirts of Paris; but he rode in a taxi
hermetically sealed to cut off their deadly scent, which in his
childhood he had loved with impunity.
Mereglise itself, however, far from being an important town
large enough to send the Due de Guermantes to represent it in the
Chamber of Deputies, is a small hamlet of about forty houses, a
little church, and two or three shops, including nowadays the
grocery of M. Camus. Its gardens are coloured with russet
dahlias shedding their petals through wire netting, and with pink
laundry hanging up to dry. The Proustian magic somehow stops
short of this insignificant village; as in Du CiJt15 de eke{ Swann, the
way to Mereglise is more important than Mereglise itself. 'Of
Meseglise,' says the Narrator, 'I never knew anything but the
Way.'2 But the church of Mereglise, at least, has its part to play
in the most remarkable of all the manifestations of the Meseglise
Way.
The church of Saint-Jacques, which seemed lost for ever
behind the hill between the Pont Saint-Hilaire and the level-
crossing, has been in view again all along the road to Mereglise,
but never for long in the same place. The road winds imper-
ceptibly, and the spires and towers ofVieuvicq, Mereglise, Saint-
Eman and Marcheville, in a kind of ritual dance, change their
places incessantly in relation to Saint-Jacques and one another.
It is the phenomenon of the moving spires which the Narrator
sees in Dr Percepied's carriage, though there it takes place at the
centre, and here round the circumference of a circle. Along the
rough track of flint and sand which leads north-east to Saint-
Eman and Marcheville just before the standing-stone, the illusion
is even more bewildering; and this is the very route taken by Dr
Percepied on his way to his patient at 'Martinville-Ie-Sec'. It was
more than twenty years later that Proust saw the enchantment
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