MARCEL PROUSTAt Saint-Eman is the chateau of the Goussencourts, with its
towers in the shape which the French call pepper-pots. For the
vast woods which surround the country home of the Duchesse de
Guermantes, however, Proust was thinking of the forests which
half encircle Illiers on the edge of the highlands of the Perche a
few miles further west; and one of these is called the Bois de
Saint-Eman. At Saint-Eman, too, is one of the sources of the
Loir, which the Narrator first sees long after his childhood at
Combray, on his walk to Guermantes with Gilberte after her
marriage to Saint-Loup, near the verge of Time Regained. This
fabulous place, 'as extra-terrestrial as the gate of Hell', is in fact,
as he is so disappointed to find, 'nothing but a kind of laundry-
tank in which bubbles rise to the surface'.1 But the most surprising
sight at Saint-Eman is a signpost which reads: 'Mereglise, 3 kilo-
metres.' Not content with their trick with the church spires, the
winding roads of the Mereglise way have succeeded in bringing
Mereglise nearer to Saint-Eman than either village is to Illiers.
Gilberte was quite serious when she said: "If you like we can go
to Guermantes by Meseglise, it is the nicest walk"; and when she
says: "If we took the road to the left and then turned to the right,
we should he at Guermantes in less than a quarter of an hour", she
is thinking of the track by the megalith, which is on the left
coming from Mereglise, and turns right, half-way to Saint-Eman,
at a hamlet called Les Dauffraies; though she is exaggerating the
shortness of the walk, which at any comfortable walking-speed
would take at least three-quarters of an hour. The 'perfect and
profound valley, carpeted with moonlight', in which they stop for
a moment, 'like two insects about to plunge into the blue calix of
a flower' ,2 is the narrow ravine formed by the Loir a little below
Saint-Eman.
We have seen the streets and church of Illiers, the hawthorn
path and the garden pond, and have taken the two ways which,
after all, can so easily be made one. It is at first sight surprising
that the real landscape of Illiers should resemble so closely the
created, mythical and universal landscape of Comb ray; and
certainly in no other section of A La Recherche du Temps Perdu did
the literal truth need so little alteration in order to make it
coincide with the ideal truth. Partly this is because Proust saw
Illiers in childhood, when the visual object, which later serves
1 III, 693 • Ill, 692-3