n absorbed, to go to Guermantes, to travel, to live a life of
happiness--I was now so remote from them that their fulfilment would
have afforded me no pleasure. How readily would I have sacrificed them
all, just to be able to cry, all night long, in the arms of Mamma!
Shuddering with emotion, I could not take my agonised eyes from my
mother's face, which was not to appear that evening in the bedroom where
I could see myself already lying, in imagination; and wished only that
I were lying dead. And this state would persist until the morrow, when,
the rays of morning leaning their bars of light, as the gardener might
lean his ladder, against the wall overgrown with nasturtiums, which
clambered up it as far as my window-sill, I would leap out of bed to run
down at once into the garden, with no thought of the fact that evening
must return, and with it the hour when I must leave my mother. And so
it was from the 'Guermantes way' that I learned to distinguish between
these states which reigned alternately in my mind, during certain
periods, going so far as to divide every day between them, each one
returning to dispossess the other with the regularity of a fever and
ague: contiguous, and yet so foreign to one another, so devoid of means
of communication, that I could no longer understand, or even picture to
myself, in one state what I had desired or dreaded or even done in the
other.

So the 'Meseglise way' and the 'Guermantes way' remain for me linked
with many of the little incidents of that one of all the divers lives
along whose parallel lines we are moved, which is the most abundant in
sudden reverses of fortune, the richest in episodes; I mean the life of
the mind. Doubtless it makes in us an imperceptible progress, and the
truths which have changed for us its meaning and its aspect, which have
opened new paths before our feet, we had for long been preparing for
their discovery; but that preparation was unconscious; and for us
those truths date only from the day, from the minute when they became
apparent. The flowers which played then among the grass, the water
which rippled past in the sunshine, the whole landscape which served as
environment to their apparition lingers around the memory of them still
with its unconscious or unheeding air; and, certainly, when they were
slowly scrutinised by this humble passer-by, by this dreaming
child--as the face of a king is scrutinised by a petitioner lost in the
crowd--that scrap