Swann's Way

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 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