" She
was in fact summoning me to cross the snowy lawn to her camp, to 'take the
field,' which the sun, by casting over it a rosy gleam, the metallic
lustre of old and worn brocades, had turned into a Field of the Cloth of
Gold.
This day, which I had begun with so many misgivings, was, as it happened,
one of the few on which I was not unduly wretched.
For, although I no longer thought, now, of anything save not to let a
single day pass without seeing Gilberte (so much so that once, when my
grandmother had not come home by dinner-time, I could not resist the
instinctive reflection that, if she had been run over in the street and
killed, I should not for some time be allowed to play in the
Champs-Elysees; when one is in love one has no love left for anyone), yet
those moments which I spent in her company, for which I had waited with so
much impatience all night and morning, for which I had quivered with
excitement, to which I would have sacrificed everything else in the world,
were by no means happy moments; well did I know it, for they were the only
moments in my life on which I concentrated a scrupulous, undistracted
attention, and yet I could not discover in them one atom of pleasure.
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