Finding Time Again: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 7 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

by Marcel Proust

And to tell the truth, like those calendars the postman brings to get his Christmas box, there was not one of my years which might not have had as its frontispiece, or intercalated between its days, the image of a woman I had desired; an image made even more arbitrary by the fact that sometimes I had never seen the woman, as for example when it was Mme Putbus’s maid, or Mlle d’Orgeville, or some girl whose name I had glimpsed in the society page of a newspaper, among “the bevy of charming waltzers.” I would imagine her as beautiful, fall in love with her, and create for her an ideal body, its height dominating a landscape in the part of the country where, as I had read in the Annuaire des châteaux, her family estates were to be found. For the women whom I had known, this landscape was at least twofold. Each woman arose, at a different point in my life, towering up like a local tutelary deity, first in the middle of one of these dream landscapes the juxtapositions of which checkered my life, the landscape in which I had first wanted to imagine her, then seen from the viewpoint of memory, surrounded by the places where I had known her and of which she reminded me, remaining attached to them, for although our lives are vagabond, our memories are sedentary and although we may move endlessly on, our memories, fastened to the places from which we free ourselves, continue to lead their unadventurous lives there, like the friends which a traveler makes briefly in a town and whom h...