They themselves
offered me no enlightenment, and I could not call upon any other flowers
to satisfy this mysterious longing. And then, inspiring me with that
rapture which we feel on seeing a work by our favourite painter quite
different from any of those that we already know, or, better still, when
some one has taken us and set us down in front of a picture of which we
have hitherto seen no more than a pencilled sketch, or when a piece of
music which we have heard played over on the piano bursts out again in our
ears with all the splendour and fullness of an orchestra, my grandfather
called me to him, and, pointing to the hedge of Tansonville, said: "You
are fond of hawthorns; just look at this pink one; isn't it pretty?"
And it was indeed a hawthorn, but one whose flowers were pink, and
lovelier even than the white. It, too, was in holiday attire, for one of
those days which are the only true holidays, the holy days of religion,
because they are not appointed by any capricious accident, as secular
holidays are appointed, upon days which are not specially ordained for
such observances, which have nothing about them that is essentially
festal--but it was attired even more richly than the rest, for the flowers
which clung to its branches, one above another, so thickly as to leave no
part of the tree undecorated, like the tassels wreathed about the crook of
a rococo shepherdess, were every one of them 'in colour,' and consequently
of a superior quality, by the aesthetic standards of Combray, to the
'plain,' if one was to judge by the scale of prices at the 'stores' in the
Square, or at Camus's, where the most expensive biscuits were those whose
sugar was pink.
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