Page 206 - swanns-way

cious! They must be hungry! And your nice leg of mutton
will be quite dried up now, after all the hours it’s been wait-
ing. What a time to come in! Well, and so you went the
Guermantes way?’
‘But, Leonie, I supposed you knew,’ Mamma would an-
swer. ‘I thought that Françoise had seen us go out by the
little gate, through the kitchen-garden.’
For there were, in the environs of Combray, two ‘ways’
which we used to take for our walks, and so diametrically
opposed that we would actually leave the house by a different
door, according to the way we had chosen: the way towards
Méséglise-la-Vineuse, which we called also ‘Swann’s way,’
because, to get there, one had to pass along the boundary of
M. Swann’s estate, and the ‘Guermantes way.’ Of Méséglise-
la-Vineuse, to tell the truth, I never knew anything more
than the way there, and the strange people who would come
over on Sundays to take the air in Combray, people whom,
this time, neither my aunt nor any of us would ‘know at all,’
and whom we would therefore assume to be ‘people who
must have come over from Méséglise.’ As for Guermantes,
I was to know it well enough one day, but that day had still
to come; and, during the whole of my boyhood, if Mésé-
glise was to me something as inaccessible as the horizon,
which remained hidden from sight, however far one went,
by the folds of a country which no longer bore the least re-
semblance to the country round Combray; Guermantes, on
the other hand, meant no more than the ultimate goal, ideal
rather than real, of the ‘Guermantes way,’ a sort of abstract
geographical term like the North Pole or the Equator. And

206 Swann’s Way