24
RICE UNIVERSITY STUDIES
himself gladly into a bee in order to collect honey from the jeunes-filles-en-
fleurs. There has come to exist a new physical rapport between author and
nature. The moon, which suggested an orange to Victor Hugo, becomes
for Proust an orange peeled and melting in his mouth. This orange is no
longer a beautiful image, but a reality; Proust comprehends the moon by
his sense of taste and assimilates it into his body. Nature becomes an organic
part of his physical and affective life.
Because of this new role which Proust has bestowed upon nature, he can
transform it into a very effective symbol. Events of inner reality are ex-
teriorized through outer occurrences. Emotional distances can thus be
rendered through geographic distances. The surrounding country of the
childhood paradise, Combray, is divided into two distinct parts: Swann’s
way, also called Méséglise, and Guermantes' way, or the country of the
Vivonne River. When the family of the narrator takes a walk, they take
either the road along the Vivonne or that which passes past the property of
Swann, but never does one afternoon walk take them along both roads.
Young Marcel receives the impression that the two ways are geographically
separated and can never be united. But in reality, geographically speaking,
they form a circle, and one can start from the country house of the family,
go along the Vivonne, pass Swann’s house and return in time for tea. This
separation is linked closely to those who live along these walks, mysterious
and magic beings, who people the young boy’s imagination. But, just as
their abodes seem spatially divorced, so has Marcel’s imagination erected
an insurmountable barrier between the lives of these magic inhabitants.
Gilberte Swann personifies the “Méséglise way” sealed off from and
unaware of the existence of the Duchesse de Guermantes, who is intrin-
sically bound to the landscape along the Vivonne River. The duchess is
endowed, in Marcel’s mind, with an existence as abstract and mysterious
as the source of the Vivonne, which the family never reaches. The boy
receives from these separate walks a strong impression of the impregnability
of the countryside, as well as of the magic life that the duchess and Gilberte
may lead.
Combray is the portal of the whole Recherche. In the tradition of the
romanesque village churches, all the figures and themes to be met later
are represented there. The two half-circles which enclose Combray intro-
duce the patterns to be found in the rest of the novel: on the one hand the
upper bourgeoisie as represented by Swann and his family, on the other
the aristocratic circle as typified by Oriane de Guermantes.
Only in “Le Temps Retrouvé” is the well ordered world of Combray
completely destroyed. The outside world has already been destroyed by
the Dreyfus case and the first World War, social barriers have fallen or
have been altered, but the separate ways around Combray have remained
fixed for Marcel. But one day, many years later, the now mature Marcel