But most often of all, on days when I was not to see Gilberte, as I had
heard that Mme. Swann walked almost every day along the Allee des Acacias,
round the big lake, and in the Allee de la Reine Marguerite, I would guide
Francoise in the direction of the Bois de Boulogne. It was to me like one
of those zoological gardens in which one sees assembled together a variety
of flora, and contrasted effects in landscape; where from a hill one
passes to a grotto, a meadow, rocks, a stream, a trench, another hill, a
marsh, but knows that they are there only to enable the hippopotamus,
zebra, crocodile, rabbit, bear and heron to disport themselves in a
natural or a picturesque setting; this, the Bois, equally complex, uniting
a multitude of little worlds, distinct and separate--placing a stage set
with red trees, American oaks, like an experimental forest in Virginia,
next to a fir-wood by the edge of the lake, or to a forest grove from
which would suddenly emerge, in her lissom covering of furs, with the
large, appealing eyes of a dumb animal, a hastening walker--was the Garden
of Woman; and like the myrtle-alley in the Aeneid, planted for their
delight with trees of one kind only, the Allee des Acacias was thronged by
the famous Beauties of the day.
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