Page 215 - swanns-way

rated, like the tassels wreathed about the crook of a rococo
shepherdess, were every one of them ‘in colour,’ and conse-
quently of a superior quality, by the aesthetic standards of
Combray, to the ‘plain,’ if one was to judge by the scale of
prices at the ‘stores’ in the Square, or at Camus’s, where the
most expensive biscuits were those whose sugar was pink.
And for my own part I set a higher value on cream cheese
when it was pink, when I had been allowed to tinge it with
crushed strawberries. And these flowers had chosen pre-
cisely the colour of some edible and delicious thing, or of
some exquisite addition to one’s costume for a great festival,
which colours, inasmuch as they make plain the reason for
their superiority, are those whose beauty is most evident to
the eyes of children, and for that reason must always seem
more vivid and more natural than any other tints, even after
the child’s mind has realised that they offer no gratification
to the appetite, and have not been selected by the dressmak-
er. And, indeed, I had felt at once, as I had felt before the
white blossom, but now still more marvelling, that it was
in no artificial manner, by no device of human construc-
tion, that the festal intention of these flowers was revealed,
but that it was Nature herself who had spontaneously ex-
pressed it (with the simplicity of a woman from a village
shop, labouring at the decoration of a street altar for some
procession) by burying the bush in these little rosettes, al-
most too ravishing in colour, this rustic ‘pompadour.’ High
up on the branches, like so many of those tiny rose-trees,
their pots concealed in jackets of paper lace, whose slender
stems rise in a forest from the altar on the greater festivals,

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