You, you have
never done me any harm. So I shall always love you." And, drying my eyes,
I promised them that, when I grew up, I would never copy the foolish
example of other men, but that even in Paris, on fine spring days, instead
of paying calls and listening to silly talk, I would make excursions into
the country to see the first hawthorn-trees in bloom.
Once in the fields we never left them again during the rest of our
Meseglise walk. They were perpetually crossed, as though by invisible
streams of traffic, by the wind, which was to me the tutelary genius of
Combray. Every year, on the day of our arrival, in order to feel that I
really was at Combray, I would climb the hill to find it running again
through my clothing, and setting me running in its wake. One always had
the wind for companion when one went the 'Meseglise way,' on that swelling
plain which stretched, mile beyond mile, without any disturbance of its
gentle contour. I knew that Mlle. Swann used often to go and spend a few
days at Laon, and, for all that it was many miles away, the distance was
obviated by the absence of any intervening obstacle; when, on hot
afternoons, I would see a breath of wind emerge from the farthest horizon,
bowing the heads of the corn in distant fields, pouring like a flood over
all that vast expanse, and finally settling down, warm and rustling, among
the clover and sainfoin at my feet, that plain which was common to us both
seemed then to draw us together, to unite us; I would imagine that the
same breath had passed by her also, that there was some message from her
in what it was whispering to me, without my being able to understand it,
and I would catch and kiss it as it passed.
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