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Proust, Marcel, 1871-1922

"Swann's Way"

And for my own part I set a higher value on cream cheese
when it was pink, when I had been allowed to tinge it with crushed
strawberries. And these flowers had chosen precisely the colour of some
edible and delicious thing, or of some exquisite addition to one's costume
for a great festival, which colours, inasmuch as they make plain the
reason for their superiority, are those whose beauty is most evident to
the eyes of children, and for that reason must always seem more vivid and
more natural than any other tints, even after the child's mind has
realised that they offer no gratification to the appetite, and have not
been selected by the dressmaker. And, indeed, I had felt at once, as I had
felt before the white blossom, but now still more marvelling, that it was
in no artificial manner, by no device of human construction, that the
festal intention of these flowers was revealed, but that it was Nature
herself who had spontaneously expressed it (with the simplicity of a woman
from a village shop, labouring at the decoration of a street altar for
some procession) by burying the bush in these little rosettes, almost too
ravishing in colour, this rustic 'pompadour.


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