In Search of Lost Time [volumes 1 to 7]

by Marcel Proust

Mme. de Villeparisis’s carriage moved fast. Scarcely had I time to see the girl who was coming in our direction; and yet — as the beauty of people is not like the beauty of things, as we feel that it is that of an unique creature, endowed with consciousness and free-will — as soon as her individuality, a soul still vague, a will unknown to me, presented a tiny picture of itself, enormously reduced but complete, in the depths of her indifferent eyes, at once, by a mysterious response of the pollen ready in me for the pistils that should receive it, I felt surging through me the embryo, as vague, as minute, of the desire not to let this girl pass without forcing her mind to become conscious of my person, without preventing her desires from wandering to some one else, without coming to fix myself in her dreams and to seize and occupy her heart.