tters not that the
actions, the feelings of this new order of creatures appear to us in
the guise of truth, since we have made them our own, since it is in
ourselves that they are happening, that they are holding in thrall,
while we turn over, feverishly, the pages of the book, our quickened
breath and staring eyes. And once the novelist has brought us to that
state, in which, as in all purely mental states, every emotion is
multiplied ten-fold, into which his book comes to disturb us as might
a dream, but a dream more lucid, and of a more lasting impression than
those which come to us in sleep; why, then, for the space of an hour
he sets free within us all the joys and sorrows in the world, a few of
which, only, we should have to spend years of our actual life in getting
to know, and the keenest, the most intense of which would never have
been revealed to us because the slow course of their development stops
our perception of them. It is the same in life; the heart changes, and
that is our worst misfortune; but we learn of it only from reading or by
imagination; for in reality its alteration, like that of certain natural
phenomena, is so gradual that, even if we are able to distinguish,
successively, each of its different states, we are still spared the
actual sensation of change.

Next to, but distinctly less intimate a part of myself than this human
element, would come the view, more or less projected before my eyes,
of the country in which the action of the story was taking place, which
made a far stronger impression on my mind than the other, the actual
landscape which would meet my eyes when I raised them from my book. In
this way, for two consecutive summers I used to sit in the heat of our
Combray garden, sick with a longing inspired by the book I was then
reading for a land of mountains and rivers, where I could see an endless
vista of sawmills, where beneath the limpid currents fragments of
wood lay mouldering in beds of watercress; and nearby, rambling and
clustering along low walls, purple flowers and red. And since there was
always lurking in my mind the dream of a woman who would enrich me with
her love, that dream in those two summers used to be quickened with the
freshness and coolness of running water; and whoever she might be, the
woman whose image I called to mind, purple flowers and red would at once
spring up on either side of her like complementary colours.

This was not only because an image of w