“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?” “How did I hear of Méséglise? But it’s a well-known place; people have told me about it—yes, over and over again,” he assured her with that criminal inexactitude of the informer who, whenever we attempt to form an impartial estimate of the importance that a thing which matters to us may have for other people, makes it impossible for us to succeed. “I can tell you, it’s better down there, under the cherry-trees, than standing before the fire all day.” She spoke to them even of Eulalie as a good person. For since Eulalie’s death Françoise had completely forgotten that she had loved her as little in her life time as she loved every one whose cupboard was bare, who was dying of hunger, and after that came, like a good for nothing, thanks to the bounty of the rich, to “put on airs”. It no longer pained her that Eulalie had so skilfully managed, Sunday after Sunday, to secure her “trifle” from my aunt. As for the latter, Françoise never left off singing her praises. “But it was at Combray, surely, that you used to be, with a cousin of Madame?” asked the young footman.