Page 241 - swanns-way

to discover some misdeed that I had already forgotten, and
would begin to scold me severely, just as I flung myself upon
them with a kiss.
Sometimes to the exhilaration which I derived from be-
ing alone would be added an alternative feeling, so that I
could not be clear in my mind to which I should give the
casting vote; a feeling stimulated by the desire to see rise
up before my eyes a peasant-girl whom I might clasp in
my arms. Coming abruptly, and without giving me time to
trace it accurately to its source among so many ideas of a
very different kind, the pleasure which accompanied this
desire seemed only a degree superior to what was given me
by my other thoughts. I found an additional merit in ev-
erything that was in my mind at the moment, in the pink
reflection of the tiled roof, the wild grass in the wall, the
village of Roussainville into which I had long desired to
penetrate, the trees of its wood and the steeple of its church,
created in them by this fresh emotion which made them ap-
pear more desirable only because I thought it was they that
had provoked it, and which seemed only to wish to bear
me more swiftly towards them when it filled my sails with
a potent, unknown, and propitious breeze. But if this de-
sire that a woman should appear added for me something
more exalting than the charms of nature, they in their turn
enlarged what I might, in the woman’s charm, have found
too much restricted. It seemed to me that the beauty of the
trees was hers also, and that, as for the spirit of those hori-
zons, of the village of Roussainville, of the books which I
was reading that year, it was her kiss which would make me

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