CONTENTS
Swann's way
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Author: Proust Marcel (1871-1922)
Year: 1913
So the "Méséglise way" and the "Guermantes way" remain for me linked with many of the little incidents of that one of all the divers lives along whose parallel lines we are moved, which is the most abundant in sudden reverses of fortune, the richest in episodes; I mean the life of the mind... The flowers which played then among the grass, the water which rippled past in the sunshine, the whole landscape which served as environment to their apparition lingers around the memory of them still, with its unconscious or unheeding air; and certainly, when they were slowly scrutinised by this humble passer-by, by this dreaming child – as the face of a king is scrutinised by a petitioner lost in the crowd – that scrap of nature, that corner of a garden could never suppose that it would be thanks to him that they would be elected to survive in all their most ephemeral details; and yet... my exaltation of mind has borne them with it, and has succeeded in making them traverse all these successive years, while all around them the once-trodden ways have vanished, while those who thronged those trodden ways, are dead.
Tr. Scott-Moncrieff.
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