“Oh! Méséglise, is it?” said Françoise with the broad smile which one could always bring to her lips by uttering any of those names⁠—Méséglise, Combray, Tansonville. They were so intimate a part of her life that she felt, on meeting them outside it, on hearing them used in conversation, a hilarity more or less akin to that which a professor excites in his class by making an allusion to some contemporary personage whose name the students had never supposed could possibly greet their ears from the height of the academic chair. Her pleasure arose also from the feeling that these places were something to her which they were not for the rest of the world, old companions with whom one has shared many delights; and she smiled at them as if she found in them something witty, because she did find there a great part of herself.

“Yes, you may well say so, son, it is a pretty enough place is Méséglise;” she went on with a tinkling laugh, “but how did you ever come to hear tell of Méséglise?”