Why is selenium throwing an error?

Question

Python

Here is the code

driver = webdriver.Firefox('C:\\py3eg\\geckodriver\\geckodriver.exe')
driver.get('https://freelance.ru/login/')

Writes [WinError 267] Wrong folder name: 'C:\py3eg\geckodriver\geckodriver.exe'
Here is where geckodriver is

Downloaded from here https://github.com/Mozilla/geckodriver/releases
If you write driver = webdriver.Firefox( executable_path=r'C:\\py3eg\\geckodriver\\geckodriver.exe') then everything works. Why?