And yet, because there is an element of
individuality in places, when I am seized with a desire to see again the
'Guermantes way,' it would not be satisfied were I led to the banks of a
river in which were lilies as fair, or even fairer than those in the
Vivonne, any more than on my return home in the evening, at the hour when
there awakened in me that anguish which, later on in life, transfers
itself to the passion of love, and may even become its inseparable
companion, I should have wished for any strange mother to come in and say
good night to me, though she were far more beautiful and more intelligent
than my own. No: just as the one thing necessary to send me to sleep
contented (in that untroubled peace which no mistress, in later years, has
ever been able to give me, since one has doubts of them at the moment when
one believes in them, and never can possess their hearts as I used to
receive, in her kiss, the heart of my mother, complete, without scruple or
reservation, unburdened by any liability save to myself) was that it
should be my mother who came, that she should incline towards me that face
on which there was, beneath her eye, something that was, it appears, a
blemish, and which I loved as much as all the rest--so what I want to see
again is the 'Guermantes way' as I knew it, with the farm that stood a
little apart from the two neighbouring farms, pressed so close together,
at the entrance to the oak avenue; those meadows upon whose surface, when
it is polished by the sun to the mirroring radiance of a lake, are
outlined the leaves of the apple-trees; that whole landscape whose
individuality sometimes, at night, in my dreams, binds me with a power
that is almost fantastic, of which I can discover no trace when I awake.
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