The inhuman emptiness of this deconsecrated forest

In the last few pages that end Swann's Way, the narrator is now much older. Proust takes us forward in time and lets the narrator reminisce about the past.

He walks down the streets he used to know as a boy, and where he watched elegant ladies, like Mme Swann, promenade.

"...they recalled to me the happy days of my unquestioning youth, when I would hasten eagerly to the spots where masterpieces of female elegance would be incarnate for a few moments beneath the unconscious, accommodating boughs."

"...[I was] smitten by a desire to see again what I had once loved, as ardent as the desire that had driven me many years before along the same paths...Alas! there was nothing now but motor-cars..."

"In place of the beautiful dresses in which Mme Swann walked like a queen...they passed before me in a desultory, haphazard, meaningless fashion, containing in themselves no beauty which my eyes might have tried, as in the old days, to re-create. They were just women, in whose elegance I had no faith, and whose clothes seemed to me unimportant."

"Nature was resuming its reign over the Bois, from which had vanished all trace of the idea that it was the Elysian Garden of Women...[It] seemed to proclaim the inhuman emptiness of this deconsecrated forest, and helped me to understand how paradoxical it is to seek in reality for the pictures that are stored in one's memory..."

"The reality that I had known no longer existed...and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years."