THE TWO WAYS 33J oinville d' Artois. She lived in a lonely house and was a subject
for scandal: for the other qualities of Mile Vinteuil, her homo-
sexuality so closely united to her sadism, Proust had only to look
in himself. We shall find him, many years later, inviting the
partners of his pleasure to desecrate the images of his dead
parents, as part of the ritual of his enjoyment; for the form of
sadism which in Mile Vinteuil seems hardly to deserve the name
(since she cannot really hurt her dead father by encouraging her
friend to spit on his photograph) was to him the most real,
horrifYing and irresistible.
In his novel Proust called Vinteuil's Mirougrain 'Mont-
jouvain', and situated it on the Meseglise Way; whereas, since
Mirougrain is in fact on the river in the direction of Saint-Eman,
it would seem to belong of right to the Guermantes Way. But
there are several links which made this change of place and name
natural to his imagination. The road to Laons, which begins on
the way to Mereglise, runs past Mirougrain; both Mirougrain and
Montjouvin are on a river and by a pond; and in the eighteenth
century the chateau of Montjouvin, of which nothing now
remains but its water-mill, was owned by a certain Jean-Jacques
Jouvet de Mirougrain. When Dr Percepied met Vinteuil by the
cemetery, where he had gone to weep over his wife's grave, the
unhappy music-teacher was a long way from Montjouvain, but
little more than half a mile from Mirougrain.
Saint-Eman can be reached from Mirougrain either by follow-
ing the road to Laons, or along the path by the bank of the Loir,
or by the road which leads from the Place du Calvaire at IIliers
past the cemetery. Half a mile beyond Mirougrain is the farm on
the right of the road, 'at some distance from two other farms
which were themselves close together', which seems to the
Narrator one of the chief symbols of the Guermantes Way; for on
their way back it is only half an hour from home, where dinner
will be later than usual, as is the rule when they have walked
towards Guermantes; he will be sent to bed immediately after the
soup course, and his mother, 'kept at table just as though there
had been company to dinner', will not come upstairs to give him
his good-night kiss.! The isolated farm is called Crasne, and the
two other farms are the hamlet ofLes Perruches. At Les Perruches
a turning left soon reaches Saint-Eman.
I I, 18'-3