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But, later on, I formed the habit of going out by myself on such days, and walking towards Meseglise-la-Vineuse, during that autumn when we had to come to Combray to settle the division of my aunt Leonie's estate; for she had died at last, leaving both parties among her neighbours triumphant in the fact of her demise those who had insisted that her mode of life was enfeebling and must ultimately kill her, and, equally, those who had always maintained that she suffered from some disease not imaginary, but organic, by the visible proof of which the most sceptical would be obliged to own themselves convinced, once she had succumbed to it; causing no intense grief to any save one of her survivors, but to that one a grief savage in its violence.
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 Meseglise-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 Meseglise-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 Meseglise. 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 Meseglise 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 resemblance 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.
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