The zone of melancholy which I then
entered was totally distinct from that other zone, in which I had been
bounding for joy a moment earlier, just as sometimes in the sky a band of
pink is separated, as though by a line invisibly ruled, from a band of
green or black. You may see a bird flying across the pink; it draws near
the border-line, touches it, enters and is lost upon the black. The
longings by which I had just now been 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.
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