Page 285 - swanns-way

haps, quite simply, from which of my dreams—it comes.
But it is pre-eminently as the deepest layer of my mental
soil, as firm sites on which I still may build, that I regard
the Méséglise and Guermantes ‘ways.’ It is because I used
to think of certain things, of certain people, while I was
roaming along them, that the things, the people which they
taught me to know, and these alone, I still take seriously,
still give me joy. Whether it be that the faith which creates
has ceased to exist in me, or that reality will take shape in
the memory alone, the flowers that people shew me nowa-
days for the first time never seem to me to be true flowers.
The ‘Méséglise way’ with its lilacs, its hawthorns, its corn-
flowers, its poppies, its apple-trees, the ‘Guermantes way’
with its river full of tadpoles, its water-lilies, and its butter-
cups have constituted for me for all time the picture of the
land in which I fain would pass my life, in which my only
requirements are that I may go out fishing, drift idly in a
boat, see the ruins of a gothic fortress in the grass, and find
hidden among the cornfields—as Saint-André-des-Champs
lay hidden—an old church, monumental, rustic, and yellow
like a mill-stone; and the cornflowers, the hawthorns, the
apple-trees which I may happen, when I go walking, to en-
counter in the fields, because they are situated at the same
depth, on the level of my past life, at once establish contact
with my heart. And yet, because there is an element of in-
dividuality in places, when I am seized with a desire to see
again the ‘Guermantes way,’ it would not be satisfied were I
led to the banks of a river in which were lilies as fair, or even
fairer than those in the Vivonne, any more than on my re-

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