United States or Vatican City ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Since my father used always to speak of the 'Meseglise way' as comprising the finest view of a plain that he knew anywhere, and of the 'Guermantes way' as typical of river scenery, I had invested each of them, by conceiving them in this way as two distinct entities, with that cohesion, that unity which belongs only to the figments of the mind; the smallest detail of either of them appeared to me as a precious thing, which exhibited the special excellence of the whole, while, immediately beside them, in the first stages of our walk, before we had reached the sacred soil of one or the other, the purely material roads, at definite points on which they were set down as the ideal view over a plain and the ideal scenery of a river, were no more worth the trouble of looking at them than, to a keen playgoer and lover of dramatic art, are the little streets which may happen to run past the walls of a theatre.
But if one took the trouble to imagine Swann's utterances divested of the sonority that enwrapped them, of the moustache from under which they emerged, one found that they were the same phrases, the same inflexions, that they had the 'tone' of the Guermantes set. On important matters, Swann and the Princess had not an idea in common.
You have your share of it, all right, the 'wit of the Guermantes'!" "But people always talk about the wit of the Guermantes; I never could make out why.
And then, as she belonged to that witty 'Guermantes set' in which there survived something of the alert mentality, stripped of all commonplace phrases and conventional sentiments, which dated from Merimee, and found its final expression in the plays of Meilhac and Halevy she adapted its formula so as to suit even her social engagements, transposed it into the courtesy which was always struggling to be positive and precise, to approximate itself to the plain truth.
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.
Word Of The Day