Page 243 - swanns-way

a peasant-girl to embrace was to see those woods and yet
know nothing of their secret treasure, their deep-hidden
beauty. That girl whom I never saw save dappled with the
shadows of their leaves, was to me herself a plant of local
growth, only taller than the rest, and one whose structure
would enable me to approach more closely than in them to
the intimate savour of the land from which she had sprung.
I could believe this all the more readily (and also that the
caresses by which she would bring that savour to my sens-
es were themselves of a particular kind, yielding a pleasure
which I could never derive from any but herself) since I was
still, and must for long remain, in that period of life when
one has not yet separated the fact of this sensual pleasure
from the various women in whose company one has tast-
ed it, when one has not reduced it to a general idea which
makes one regard them thenceforward as the variable in-
struments of a pleasure that is always the same. Indeed, that
pleasure does not exist, isolated and formulated in the con-
sciousness, as the ultimate object with which one seeks a
woman’s company, or as the cause of the uneasiness which,
in anticipation, one then feels. Hardly even does one think
of oneself, but only how to escape from oneself. Obscure-
ly awaited, immanent and concealed, it rouses to such a
paroxysm, at the moment when at last it makes itself felt,
those other pleasures which we find in the tender glance, in
the kiss of her who is by our side, that it seems to us, more
than anything else, a sort of transport of gratitude for the
kindness of heart of our companion and for her touching
predilection of ourselves, which we measure by the benefits,

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