And I should have required also that they be the same women, those whose
costume interested me because, at a time when I still had faith, my
imagination had individualised them and had provided each of them with a
legend. Alas! in the acacia-avenue--the myrtle-alley--I did see some of
them again, grown old, no more now than grim spectres of what once they
had been, wandering to and fro, in desperate search of heaven knew what,
through the Virgilian groves. They had long fled, and still I stood vainly
questioning the deserted paths. The sun's face was hidden. Nature began
again to reign over the Bois, from which had vanished all trace of the
idea that it was the Elysian Garden of Woman; above the gimcrack windmill
the real sky was grey; the wind wrinkled the surface of the Grand Lac in
little wavelets, like a real lake; large birds passed swiftly over the
Bois, as over a real wood, and with shrill cries perched, one after
another, on the great oaks which, beneath their Druidical crown, and with
Dodonaic majesty, seemed to proclaim the unpeopled vacancy of this
estranged forest, and helped me to understand how paradoxical it is to
seek in reality for the pictures that are stored in one's memory, which
must inevitably lose the charm that comes to them from memory itself and
from their not being apprehended by the senses.
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