Swann's Way

We would sit down among the irises at the water's edge. In the holiday
sky a lazy cloud streamed out to its full length. Now and then, crushed
by the burden of idleness, a carp would heave up out of the water, with
an anxious gasp. It was time for us to feed. Before starting homewards
we would sit for a long time there, eating fruit and bread and
chocolate, on the grass, over which came to our ears, horizontal, faint,
but solid still and metallic, the sound of the bells of Saint-Hilaire,
which had melted not at all in the atmosphere it was so well accustomed
to traverse, but, broken piecemeal by the successive palpitation of all
their sonorous strokes, throbbed as it brushed the flowers at our feet.

Sometimes, at the water's edge and embedded in trees, we would come upon
a house of the kind called 'pleasure houses,' isolated and lost, seeing
nothing of the world, save the river which bathed its feet. A young
woman, whose pensive face and fashionable veils did not suggest a local
origin, and who had doubtless come there, in the popular phrase, 'to
bury herself,' to taste the bitter sweetness of feeling that her name,
and still more the name of him whose heart she had once held, but had