2.4 MARCEL PROUST
carrying their trowels and fishing-lines, Marcel and Robert passed
on their right one of the two ruined towers of the castle of Illiers,
built in 1019 by the wicked Geoffroy d'Illiers, Vicomte de
Chateaudun, during his quarrel with F uibert, Bishop of Chartres.
The other tower, a hundred yards further along the meadows
stretching between the town and the river, had an unhallowed
significance for Marcel: it could be seen from the lavatory window
at the top of the house, as he sat in the little room scented by a
festoon of iris-roots from the banks of the garden-pond. Here,
since it was the only place in the house where he was allowed to
lock himself in, he would retire whenever he needed privacy to
read, weep, or make his first experiments in the pleasures of sex-
experiments which were not without their heroic side, since he
was not sure at first that their rending delight would not be the
death of him. In the morning he would vow not to give way to
temptation; but after lunch, when he was replete with Ernestine's
chicken, the idea would return, 'sending a mounting, delicious
wave of blood to his heart', and he would climb again to his grotto
of pleasure, where only the branches of flowering currant and the
castle tower could see him. In his novel he transferred the under-
ground chamber of the first tower to this second, and brought the
ruined keep to the market-town of Roussainville-Ie-Pin, on the
Meseglise W'ay, and surrounded it with woods; but the real
Roussainville is a tiny hamlet a mile south ofIlliers, without ruins,
woods or market, a whole quarter of the compass away from
Mereglise; and the suffix Ie-Pin comes from Bailleau-Ie-Pin, a
village six miles north~east of Illiers on the road to Chartres.
Perhaps the naughty boys and girls of the town, led by 'Theodore'
(who was Victor, the errand-boy at Legw§'s grocery, choirboy at
Saint-Jacques, and brother of Jules Amiot's gardener Menard),
played in these ruins at Illiers as at Combray, and Marcel with
them; or perhaps it was only the thought of his forbidden
pleasures in the lavatory that made Roussainville in the rain seem
to be 'chastised like a village in the Old Testament by God the
Father'.!
After the laundry-tank (on the left), the kitchen-garden, the
castle ruins and a field of grazing cows (on the right), the Rue des
Lavoirs ends in a wooden footbridge over the Loir, variously
known as the Pont-Vieux, the Passerelle or the Grand' Planche,
1 I, 'S'