Page 224 - swanns-way

ruined jacket. I did not, however, hear her. ‘Oh, my poor lit-
tle hawthorns,’ I was assuring them through my sobs, ‘it is
not you that want to make me unhappy, to force me to leave
you. You, you have never done me any harm. So I shall al-
ways love you.’ And, drying my eyes, I promised them that,
when I grew up, I would never copy the foolish example of
other men, but that even in Paris, on fine spring days, in-
stead of paying calls and listening to silly talk, I would make
excursions into the country to see the first hawthorn-trees
in bloom.
Once in the fields we never left them again during the
rest of our Méséglise walk. They were perpetually crossed,
as though by invisible streams of traffic, by the wind, which
was to me the tutelary genius of Combray. Every year, on
the day of our arrival, in order to feel that I really was at
Combray, I would climb the hill to find it running again
through my clothing, and setting me running in its wake.
One always had the wind for companion when one went the
‘Méséglise way,’ on that swelling plain which stretched, mile
beyond mile, without any disturbance of its gentle contour.
I knew that Mlle. Swann used often to go and spend a few
days at Laon, and, for all that it was many miles away, the
distance was obviated by the absence of any intervening
obstacle; when, on hot afternoons, I would see a breath of
wind emerge from the farthest horizon, bowing the heads
of the corn in distant fields, pouring like a flood over all that
vast expanse, and finally settling down, warm and rustling,
among the clover and sainfoin at my feet, that plain which
was common to us both seemed then to draw us together, to

224 Swann’s Way