I must try, and I must succeed; to tell the truth I did not yet see how, and during these first moments I opened my hands, gazed at them, cracked my knuckles, whether because the mind which cannot find what it is seeking, in a fit of laziness allows itself to halt for an instant at a spot where the most unimportant things are distinctly visible to it, like the blades of grass on the embankment which we see from the carriage window trembling in the wind, when the train halts in the open country⁠—an immobility that is not always more fertile than that of the captured animal which, paralysed by fear or fascinated, gazes without moving a muscle⁠—or that I might hold my body in readiness⁠—with my mind at work inside it and, in my mind, the means of action against this or that person⁠—as though it were no more than a weapon from which would be fired the shot that was to separate Albertine from Léa and her two friends.