MARCEL PROUSTMile Vinteuil. This complex of topography and persons befits the
complex of forbidden love which it embodies; for it is at 'Mont-
jouvain', and through Vinteuil's daughter, that the innocent
Combray is linked with the Cities of the Plain.
At Combray Mirougrain is a farm belonging to Aunt Leonie;
it is one of her favourite daydreams that one day her house will
be burned down with all the family in it, and that she will have
time to escape at her leisure and go to spend the summer 'in her
pretty farmhouse at Mirougrain, where there was a waterfall'.1 At
Illiers Mirougrain is a country-house called Le Rocher de Mirou-
grain, a mile up the Loir in the direction of Saint-Em an. The Loir
broadens here into a still pool, crossed at one end by a wooden
foothridge; on the far side is a steep slope, from which one can
look down on the house; and, just as at Mile Vinteuil's 'Mont-
jouvain', there is a pond below the house, and a red-tiled
gardener's hut by the pond. No one will ever know whether in
real life Marcel hid in the bushes on the slope to spy on the lonely
young lady of the house; but it is not unlikely that he did, and
local gossip suggested that he might see something he ought not
to see.
Her name was Juliette Joinville d'Artois, and in 1880, when
Marcel was nine, she was in her early twenties. Her melancholy
love of the past had taken a form which would horrify a modem
archaeologist: she had collected prehistoric dolmens from the
surrounding countryside, fortunately overlooking the one near
Mereglise, and built with them a monstrous edifice in her garden,
which she proudly called 'my temple'. 'In this fair-haired, frail,
twenty-year-old child,' she remarks of herself in a volume called
A Journey through My Heart, published in 1887, 'I see a soul
longing to kill its body, a body doing all it can to bring rest to its
weary soul. And in the colossal, awe-inspiring, defensive mass of
my temple I see a savage desire to create a place of refiIge, a
shelter against further misfortunes.' Her only companion was a
deaf-mute man-servant, whose presence gave rise to strange
rumours in Illiers: she had chosen him, she said, from love of
silence, and from desire to learn and teach the deaf-and-dumb
language; but was it not rather, as scandal suggested, because he
would be unable to tell what he saw at Mirougrain? Nothing more
is known to-day of the morals, seventy years ago, of poor Mile
1 I, 116