nshine, for lilies, for the Palace of the Doges and for Santa Maria
del Fiore.

But if their names thus permanently absorbed the image that I had formed
of these towns, it was only by transforming that image, by subordinating
its reappearance in me to their own special laws; and in consequence of
this they made it more beautiful, but at the same time more different
from anything that the towns of Normandy or Tuscany could in reality be,
and, by increasing the arbitrary delights of my imagination, aggravated
the disenchantment that was in store for me when I set out upon my
travels. They magnified the idea that I formed of certain points on the
earth's surface, making them more special, and in consequence more
real. I did not then represent to myself towns, landscapes, historic
buildings, as pictures more or less attractive, cut out here and there
of a substance that was common to them all, but looked on each of them
as on an unknown thing, different from all the rest, a thing for which
my soul was athirst, by the knowledge of which it would benefit. How
much more individual still was the character that they assumed from
being designated by names, names that were only for themselves, proper
names such as people have. Words present to us little pictures of
things, lucid and normal, like the pictures that are hung on the walls
of schoolrooms to give children an illustration of what is meant by
a carpenter's bench, a bird, an ant-hill; things chosen as typical of
everything else of the same sort. But names present to us--of persons
and of towns which they accustom us to regard as individual, as unique,
like persons--a confused picture, which draws from the names, from
the brightness or darkness of their sound, the colour in which it is
uniformly painted, like one of those posters, entirely blue or entirely
red, in which, on account of the limitations imposed by the process used
in their reproduction, or by a whim on the designer's part, are blue or
red not only the sky and the sea, but the ships and the church and the
people in the streets. The name of Parma, one of the towns that I most
longed to visit, after reading the _Chartreuse_, seeming to me compact
and glossy, violet-tinted, soft, if anyone were to speak of such or
such a house in Parma, in which I should be lodged, he would give me the
pleasure of thinking that I was to inhabit a dwelling that was compact
and glossy, violet-tinted, soft, and that bore no relation t