ers to light for
her, and sits on there, hearing nothing further, except an occasional
remark on the weather which the porter exchanges with a messenger
whom he will send off suddenly, when he notices the time, to put some
customer's wine on the ice; so, having declined Francoise's offer to
make me some tea or to stay beside me, I let her go off again to the
servants' hall, and lay down and shut my eyes, and tried not to hear the
voices of my family who were drinking their coffee in the garden.

But after a few seconds I realised that, by writing that line to Mamma,
by approaching--at the risk of making her angry--so near to her that I
felt I could reach out and grasp the moment in which I should see her
again, I had cut myself off from the possibility of going to sleep
until I actually had seen her, and my heart began to beat more and more
painfully as I increased my agitation by ordering myself to keep calm
and to acquiesce in my ill-fortune. Then, suddenly, my anxiety subsided,
a feeling of intense happiness coursed through me, as when a strong
medicine begins to take effect and one's pain vanishes: I had formed a
resolution to abandon all attempts to go to sleep without seeing Mamma,
and had decided to kiss her at all costs, even with the certainty of
being in disgrace with her for long afterwards, when she herself came
up to bed. The tranquillity which followed my anguish made me extremely
alert, no less than my sense of expectation, my thirst for and my fear
of danger.

Noiselessly I opened the window and sat down on the foot of my bed;
hardly daring to move in case they should hear me from below. Things
outside seemed also fixed in mute expectation, so as not to disturb the
moonlight which, duplicating each of them and throwing it back by the
extension, forwards, of a shadow denser and more concrete than its
substance, had made the whole landscape seem at once thinner and longer,
like a map which, after being folded up, is spread out upon the ground.
What had to move--a leaf of the chestnut-tree, for instance--moved. But
its minute shuddering, complete, finished to the least detail and with
utmost delicacy of gesture, made no discord with the rest of the scene,
and yet was not merged in it, remaining clearly outlined. Exposed upon
this surface of silence, which absorbed nothing from them, the most
distant sounds, those which must have come from gardens at the far end
of the town, could be distinguished with such