THE TWO WAYS 39Thierry'. In the Pre Catelan, where in previous years he had lain
in the hazel-copse by the asparagus-bed reading Dickens, George
Eliot, or Gautier's Le Capitaine Fracasse, he was now captivated
by La Conquete de l'Angleterre par lcs Normands, and Recits des
Temps Meroyingiens. After the obligatory game of hide-and-seek,
and the picnic tea, during which his book must be left unopened
on the grass by the pool, Marcel would escape to read in a horn-
beam-tree at the top of the garden; and the voices of the family
calling him in vain had as little power to disturb him as the distant
chimes of the church clock, 'which seemed to peal from some-
where behind the blue sky'. But it was decided that II1iers was bad
for his health. The Loir, Dr Proust declared, was a menace to the
whole town; and his friends the hawthorns and the apple-trees
in flower had turned against him, and punished his love with the
agonies of asthma. Only sea or mountain air could cure him, and
in future his holidays were spent with his grandmother on the
coast of Normandy or with his mother at inland health-resorts.
Perhaps his education also made the former impromptu visits to
II1iers impossible; for he had now left his preparatory school for
the Lycee Condorcet, and had outgrown the arithmetic lessons of
the village optician, and Canon Marquis's tuition in Latin and the
names of flowers. He saw II1iers again in rare visits, which
continued till he was past thirty. But the spell was broken, and
II1iers now resembled only the Combray of the sojourn at Tanson-
ville with Gilberte de Saint-Loup: the Loir was 'a meagre, ugly
stream', and the Mereglise and Saint-Eman ways had lost, or had
not yet acquired, their meaning.
As he grew older, his memories of II1iers became ever more
vivid and more vague, like the landscape of a dream. Geography
changed, space was altered by time. In what street was the house
of Aunt Elisabeth, at which end ofIIliers was the Mall? The back-
garden widened and stretched, and along its gravel paths his dead
grandmother strode up and down in the rain; the family visitor
had the melancholy, ironical face of Charles Haas. He built a
country house in the Pre Catelan for Swann and Gilberte, and
brought a Lesbian girl to Le Rocher de Mirougrain.