one has not yet separated the fact
of this sensual pleasure from the various women in whose company one has
tasted it, when one has not reduced it to a general idea which makes one
regard them thenceforward as the variable instruments of a pleasure that
is always the same. Indeed, that pleasure does not exist, isolated and
formulated in the consciousness, 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. Obscurely 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, by the happiness that she showers upon
us.

Alas, it was in vain that I implored the dungeon-keep of Roussainville,
that I begged it to send out to meet me some daughter of its village,
appealing to it as to the sole confidant to whom I had disclosed my
earliest desire when, from the top floor of our house at Combray, from
the little room that smelt of orris-root, I had peered out and seen
nothing but its tower, framed in the square of the half-opened window,
while, with the heroic scruples of a traveller setting forth for
unknown climes, or of a desperate wretch hesitating on the verge of
self-destruction, faint with emotion, I explored, across the bounds of
my own experience, an untrodden path which, I believed, might lead me to
my death, even--until passion spent itself and left me shuddering among
the sprays of flowering currant which, creeping in through the window,
tumbled all about my body. In vain I called upon it now. In vain I
compressed the whole landscape into my field of vision, draining it with
an exhaustive gaze which sought to extract from it a female creature. I
might go alone as far as the porch of Saint-Andre-des-Champs: never did
I find there the girl whom I should inevitably have met, had I been with
my grandfather, and so unable to engage her in conversation. I would fix
my eyes, without limit of time, upon the trunk of a distant tree, from
behind which she must appear and spring towards me; my closest scrutiny
left the hor