The “Méséglise way” with its lilacs, its hawthorns, its cornflowers, its poppies, its apple-trees, the “Guermantes way” with its river full of tadpoles, its water-lilies, and its buttercups have constituted for me for all time the picture of the land in which I fain would pass my life, in which my only requirements are that I may go out fishing, drift idly in a boat, see the ruins of a gothic fortress in the grass, and find hidden among the cornfields⁠—as Saint-André-des-Champs lay hidden⁠—an old church, monumental, rustic, and yellow like a millstone; and the cornflowers, the hawthorns, the apple-trees which I may happen, when I go walking, to encounter in the fields, because they are situated at the same depth, on the level of my past life, at once establish contact with my heart.