t 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.
And so to 'take the Guermantes way' in order to get to Meseglise, or
vice versa, would have seemed to me as nonsensical a proceeding as to
turn to the east in order to reach the west. 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, above all, I set between
them, far more distinctly than the mere distance in miles and yards and
inches which separated one from the other, the distance that there was
between the two parts of my brain in which I used to think of them, one
of those distances of the mind which time serves only to lengthen, which
separate things irremediably from one another, keeping them for ever
upon different planes. And this distinction was rendered still more
absolute because the habit we had of never going both ways on the same
day, or in the course of the same walk, but the 'Meseglise way' one time
and the 'Guermantes way' another, shut them up, so to speak, far apart
and unaware of each other's existence, in the sealed vessels--between
which there could be no communication--of separate afternoons.

When we had decided to go the 'Meseglise way' we would start (without
undue haste, and ev