Page 283 - swanns-way

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 Mam-
ma! 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 ly-
ing, 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 nas-
turtiums, 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 be-
tween 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 communi-
cation, 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 ‘Méséglise 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. Doubt-
less it makes in us an imperceptible progress, and the truths

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