THE TWO WAYS 3Sonly to mask immaterial truth, is still able to reveal it: for to the
child's eye object and symbol are one and the same. Partly, too,
it is because he wrote of Combray after many years, when
memory had already performed its task of rejecting the in-
essential. Perhaps there is even some danger of exaggerating the
objectivity of the presence in the Illiers landscape of the symbols
Proust saw there: they are undoubtedly real outside this world,
but in this world may they not be illusions? Perhaps, as the Baron
de Charlus said of Combray, Illiers is only 'a little town like so
many others',I and if Proust had spent his childhood holidays in
one of those many other little towns, he would have extracted
the same truths from different symbols. And yet, at Illiers, the
church and grey streets and gardens of Combray are there for all
to see; the village spires perform their strange movement, the two
ways of rolling plain and narrow river lead for ever in opposite
directions, and nevertheless meet. In the real topography of
Illiers the mysterious significance of the symbolical landscape of
Combray was already latent. However, the differences between
Illiers and Combray are real and important; by observing them
we may detect Proust in the act of adjusting the truth of llliers
to make it conform still more closely to the truth of Combray.
It was necessary first of all to set Combray free, to divert the
reader's attention and his own imagination from the real Illiers.
He planted clues which suggest that Combray is in Normandy or
Champagne; he invented new streets, the Rue Sainte-Hildegarde,
Rue de la Eretonnerie, Rue de Saintrailles, and changed the
position of old ones, so that the Rue du Saint-Esprit moves to
the back of Aunt Leonie's house, and the Mall, which at Illiers is
on the southern edge of the town, is to the north by the Place
du Calvaire. Saint-Jacques takes the name of the demolished
Saint-Hilaire. There is no equivalent near Illiers of the large town
of Thiberzy, whither Fran~oise had to go before dawn to fetch
the midwife for the kitchen-maid (although Combray, like Illiers,
is large enough to support a midwife of its own). There is no
village called Champieu on the Mereglise way, nor any church
of Saint-Andre-des-Champs, in the sculptured figures of whose
porch the Narrator could see Fran~oise and her philosophy,
Theodore the grocer's boy, and the peasant girl sheltering from
the rain, whom he longed in vain to meet alone. The original of
1 III, 795