Page 242 - swanns-way

master of them all; and, my imagination drawing strength
from contact with my sensuality, my sensuality expanding
through all the realms of my imagination, my desire had
no longer any bounds. Moreover—just as in moments of
musing contemplation of nature, the normal actions of the
mind being suspended, and our abstract ideas of things set
on one side, we believe with the profoundest faith in the
originality, in the individual existence of the place in which
we may happen to be—the passing figure which my desire
evoked seemed to be not any one example of the general
type of ‘woman,’ but a necessary and natural product of the
soil. For at that time everything which was not myself, the
earth and the creatures upon it, seemed to me more pre-
cious, more important, endowed with a more real existence
than they appear to full-grown men. And between the earth
and its creatures I made no distinction. I had a desire for
a peasant-girl from Méséglise or Roussainville, for a fish-
er-girl from Balbec, just as I had a desire for Balbec and
Méséglise. The pleasure which those girls were empowered
to give me would have seemed less genuine, I should have
had no faith in it any longer, if I had been at liberty to mod-
ify its conditions as I chose. To meet in Paris a fisher-girl
from Balbec or a peasant-girl from Méséglise would have
been like receiving the present of a shell which I had never
seen upon the beach, or of a fern which I had never found
among the woods, would have stripped from the pleasure
which she was about to give me all those other pleasures in
the thick of which my imagination had enwrapped her. But
to wander thus among the woods of Roussainville without

242 Swann’s Way