Finding Time Again: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 7 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

by Marcel Proust

Mlle de Saint-Loup. Was she not, as indeed most human beings are, like one of those “stars” in forests, crossroads where roads converge which have come, as they do in our lives, from the most diverse starting-points? They were numerous enough, in my case, the roads leading to Mlle de Saint-Loup and radiating out again from her. Above all it was the two great “ways” which had led to her, along which I had had so many walks and so many dreams—through her father, Robert de Saint-Loup, the Guermantes way, through her mother, Gilberte, the Méséglise way which was the “way by Swann’s.” One, through the little girl’s mother and the Champs-Élysées, led me to Swann, to my evenings at Combray, to the Méséglise way; the other, through her father, to my afternoons at Balbec, where I could visualize him close to the sunlit sea. Already some connecting roads were establishing themselves between these two main routes. For the actual Balbec, where I had met Saint-Loup, was a place that I had so much wanted to go to very largely because of what Swann had told me about the churches there, especially about the Persian church, and then again, through Robert de Saint-Loup, the nephew of the Duchesse de Guermantes, I came back, in Combray once more, to the Guermantes way. But there were still many other points in my life to which Mlle de Saint-Loup led, to the lady in pink, who was her grandmother and whom I had met at my great-uncle’s house. A new connecting road here, because this great-uncle...