Swanns Way | Page 4

of birds
building their nests, to cement into one whole; rooms where, in a keen
frost, I would feel the satisfaction of being shut in from the outer world
(like the sea-swallow which builds at the end of a dark tunnel and is
kept warm by the surrounding earth), and where, the fire keeping in all
night, I would sleep wrapped up, as it were, in a great cloak of snug and
savoury air, shot with the glow of the logs which would break out again
in flame: in a sort of alcove without walls, a cave of warmth dug out of
the heart of the room itself, a zone of heat whose boundaries were
constantly shifting and altering in temperature as gusts of air ran across

them to strike freshly upon my face, from the corners of the room, or
from parts near the window or far from the fireplace which had
therefore remained cold--or rooms in summer, where I would delight to
feel myself a part of the warm evening, where the moonlight striking
upon the half-opened shutters would throw down to the foot of my bed
its enchanted ladder; where I would fall asleep, as it might be in the
open air, like a titmouse which the breeze keeps poised in the focus of a
sunbeam--or sometimes the Louis XVI room, so cheerful that I could
never feel really unhappy, even on my first night in it: that room where
the slender columns which lightly supported its ceiling would part, ever
so gracefully, to indicate where the bed was and to keep it separate;
sometimes again that little room with the high ceiling, hollowed in the
form of a pyramid out of two separate storeys, and partly walled with
mahogany, in which from the first moment my mind was drugged by
the unfamiliar scent of flowering grasses, convinced of the hostility of
the violet curtains and of the insolent indifference of a clock that
chattered on at the top of its voice as though I were not there; while a
strange and pitiless mirror with square feet, which stood across one
corner of the room, cleared for itself a site I had not looked to find
tenanted in the quiet surroundings of my normal field of vision: that
room in which my mind, forcing itself for hours on end to leave its
moorings, to elongate itself upwards so as to take on the exact shape of
the room, and to reach to the summit of that monstrous funnel, had
passed so many anxious nights while my body lay stretched out in bed,
my eyes staring upwards, my ears straining, my nostrils sniffing
uneasily, and my heart beating; until custom had changed the colour of
the curtains, made the clock keep quiet, brought an expression of pity
to the cruel, slanting face of the glass, disguised or even completely
dispelled the scent of flowering grasses, and distinctly reduced the
apparent loftiness of the ceiling. Custom! that skilful but unhurrying
manager who begins by torturing the mind for weeks on end with her
provisional arrangements; whom the mind, for all that, is fortunate in
discovering, for without the help of custom it would never contrive, by
its own efforts, to make any room seem habitable.
Certainly I was now well awake; my body had turned about for the last
time and the good angel of certainty had made all the surrounding

objects stand still, had set me down under my bedclothes, in my
bedroom, and had fixed, approximately in their right places in the
uncertain light, my chest of drawers, my writing-table, my fireplace,
the window overlooking the street, and both the doors. But it was no
good my knowing that I was not in any of those houses of which, in the
stupid moment of waking, if I had not caught sight exactly, I could still
believe in their possible presence; for memory was now set in motion;
as a rule I did not attempt to go to sleep again at once, but used to
spend the greater part of the night recalling our life in the old days at
Combray with my great-aunt, at Balbec, Paris, Doncières, Venice, and
the rest; remembering again all the places and people that I had known,
what I had actually seen of them, and what others had told me.
At Combray, as every afternoon ended, long before the time when I
should have to go up to bed, and to lie there, unsleeping, far from my
mother and grandmother, my bedroom became the fixed point on
which my melancholy and anxious thoughts were centred. Some one
had had the happy idea of giving me, to distract me on evenings when I
seemed abnormally wretched, a magic lantern, which used to be set on