THE GARDEN OF ILLIERSand associated in the novel with Legrandin. There is a tradition
at Illiers that in the days when this bridge was only a single plank
and had no railings, the village drunkard would totter over it,
crying "Lord, lord, let me across and I'll give up the drink"; but
when he reached the other side he would begin to dance and sing,
and shout "Now I can go on drinking!" On the far side of the
bridge is a path leading upstream along the Loir, called at Com-
bray the tow-path (chemin de halage); but it can never have been
used for towing at Illiers, since a line of trees grows between it
and the river, and the Loir here is too shallow for barges. A litde
further on the walled lane from the footbridge leads into the Rue
des Vierges, which runs to the right towards the Pont Saint-
Hilaire, while a turning left goes to Tansonville, two miles away
to the south. But Tansonville gave no more than its name and its
chateau to Swann's park, the original of which lies direcdy before
us, on the opposite side of the Rue des Vierges: it is none other
than Jules Amiot's pleasure-garden, the Pre Catelan.
Up the left-hand side of the Pre Catelan climbs a narrow lane,
separated from the garden by a hedge of pink and white haw-
thorns. To Marcel the pink hawthorns seemed twice as beautiful
as the white: similarly, he reflected, the pink iced biscuits at Mme
Damoiseau's grocery were twice as expensive as the white. The
hawthorns reminded him, too, of the colour of his favourite
strawberries crushed with cream-cheese; and they seemed not
only edible but holy; for just as they made the altar of Saint-
Jacques look like a hedge in bloom in the month of Mary, so here
in the petit sentier the hawthorn chapels took on something of the
religious sanctity of the church. Their scent was not yet fatal to
him, and once, when he was ill, his mother brought him branches
of his beloved pink flower and laid them on his bed, a present
from Menard the gardener. Through the gaps in the hedge he
could look down to the lawns and ornamental water; and perhaps
once he saw there some litde girl with reddish hair, freckles and a
sly look, a first appearance of Gilberte. The Amiots and Prousts
were often joined for picnics in the Pre Catelan by friends and
their children; and all we know of Proust's method of fusing
people from different periods of his life into single characters for
his novel suggests that there was someone at Illiers who became
the Gilberte of Combray.
Uncle Jules had laid out the flat lower part of his garden near