‘A delicate, sweet scent of heliotrope wafted from a little patch of beans in full flower; it was brought to us not by a breeze from our own land, but by a wild wind from Newfoundland, unconnected to the exiled plant, without congenial reminiscence and pleasure. In this perfume not breathed by beauty, not purified in her bosom, not scattered in her path, in this perfume of a new dawn, new cultivation and new world, there was all the melancholy of regret, of absence and of youth.’
From “Memoires d’outre-tombe” by Chateaubriand
quoted in:
Proust, Marcel
"Finding Time Again" (In Search Of Lost Time, Volume 6)
p. 228, Penguin Classics, 2003
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