Marcel Proust: A Biography

THE TWO WAYS
repeated, this time in the centripetal form which it takes in his
novel, by the spires of Caen; but then, as we shall see, it was in
the country near 'Balbec', after the deaths of his parents, and in a
motor-car driven by the young chauffeur who was one of the
originals of Albertine.
The Mereglise way, Dr Proust always said, was the finest view
of a plain he had ever seen, while the Saint-Eman way was the
very type of a river-landscape. The shortest route to Saint-Eman
was by the Rue de l'Oiseau-Flesche to the Place du Calvaire and
the cemetery, after which the path leads all the way by the banks
of the Loir; but if they wished to see as much as possible of the
river they could go first by the Rue des Lavoirs to the passerelle,
and along the two 'towing-paths' to the Place du Calvaire again;
and this, though the first half of it belongs to the Mereglise way,
is the route Proust describes in his novel. But the Loir above
Illiers soon becomes only a narrow though charming brook. For
the river-scenery of the Guermantes Way he described the
country downstream from the passerelle, with its motionless
anglers, and water-lilies, and rowing-boats, and introduced the
Pre Catelan a second time: this time it is the 'property thrown
open to the public by its owner, who had made a hobby of
aquatic gardening''! A mile below Illiers, near Tansonville, the
Thironne, which comes from beyond Mereglise and gave part of
its name to the Vivonne of Combray, flows into the Loir. Where
the two rivers meet is a garden called Les Plaisances, to which he
obliquely refers in his description of the Guermantes Way: beside
the water, he says, is 'une maison dite de plaisance', where a young
woman, disappointed in love, has come 'in the popular phrase, to
bury herself'; and he sees her standing pensively framed in her
window, and looking up as the family passes.^2 Half a mile further
up the Thironne is a water-mill, whose white front wreathed in
climbing plants is reflected in a millpond covered with water-
lilies, and whose name sends a shudder through Proust's readers:
it is Montjouvin. The mysterious young woman really existed in
the country round Illiers, though she lived neither at Montjouvin
nor Les Plaisances, but at Mirougrain. In the novel her dwelling-
place is a fusion of all three, while the girl herself has become two
separate characters, one of whom is far more important than the
forsaken maiden, who never reappears: she is none other than
1 I, 169 • I, '70, '7'