Swann's Way

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 Méséglise or
Roussainville, for a fisher-girl from Balbec, just as I had a desire for
Balbec and Méséglise. 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
Méséglise 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