In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [81]
I realised that it was not for any reason peculiar to Balbec that on my arrival there I had failed to find in its church the charm which it had had for me before I knew it; that in Florence or Parma or Venice my imagination could no more take the place of my eyes when I looked at the sights there. I realised this; similarly, one New Year’s evening at nightfall, standing before a column of playbills, I had discovered the illusion that lies in our thinking that certain feast-days differ essentially from the other days in the calendar. And yet I could not prevent my memory of the time during which I had looked forward to spending Easter in Florence from continuing to make that festival the atmosphere, so to speak, of the City of Flowers, to give at once to Easter Day something Florentine and to Florence something paschal. Easter was still a long way off; but in the range of days that stretched out before me the days of Holy Week stood out more clearly at the end of those that came between. Touched by a ray, like certain houses in a village which one sees from a distance when the rest are in shadow, they had caught and kept all the sun.
The weather had now become milder. And my parents themselves, by urging me to take more exercise, gave me an excuse for continuing my morning walks. I had wanted to give them up, since they meant my meeting Mme de Guermantes. But it was for that very reason that I kept thinking all the time of those walks, and this induced me to go on finding fresh reasons for taking them, reasons which had no connexion with Mme de Guermantes and which easily convinced me that, had she never existed, I should still have gone for a walk at that hour every morning.
Alas, if for me meeting any person other than herself would have been a matter of indifference, I felt that, for her, meeting anyone in the world except myself would have been only too endurable. It happened that, in the course of her morning walks, she received the salutations of plenty of fools whom she regarded as such. But the appearance of these in her path seemed to her, if not to hold out any promise of pleasure, to be at any rate the result of mere accident. And she stopped them at times, for there are moments in which one wants to escape from oneself, to accept the hospitality offered by the soul of another, provided always that this soul, however modest and plain it may be, is a different soul, whereas in my heart she felt with exasperation that what she would have found was herself. And so, even when I had another reason for taking the same route than my desire to see her, I trembled like a guilty man as she came past; and sometimes, in order to neutralise what might seem to be excessive in my overtures, I would barely acknowledge her salute, or would stare at her without raising my hat, and succeed only in irritating her even more and making her begin to regard me as insolent and ill-bred besides.
She was now wearing lighter, or at any rate brighter clothes, and would come strolling down the street in which already, as though it were spring, in front of the narrow shops that were squeezed in between the spacious fronts of the old aristocratic mansions, over the booths of the butter-woman and the fruit-woman and the vegetable-woman, awnings were spread to protect them from the sun. I told myself that the woman whom I could see in the distance, walking, opening her sunshade, crossing the street, was, in the opinion of those best qualified to judge, the greatest living exponent of the art of performing those movements