the books which I was reading that year, it was her
kiss which would make me 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 precious,
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 Meseglise or
Roussainville, for a fisher-girl from Balbec, just as I had a desire for
Balbec and Meseglise. 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 modify its conditions as I
chose. To meet in Paris a fisher-girl from Balbec or a peasant-girl from
Meseglise 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 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 senses 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