de Saint-Loup, before dressing
for the evening. For many years have now elapsed since the Combray days,
when, coming in from the longest and latest walks, I would still be in
time to see the reflection of the sunset glowing in the panes of my
bedroom window. It is a very different kind of existence at Tansonville
now with Mme. de Saint-Loup, and a different kind of pleasure that I now
derive from taking walks only in the evenings, from visiting by moonlight
the roads on which I used to play, as a child, in the sunshine; while the
bedroom, in which I shall presently fall asleep instead of dressing for
dinner, from afar off I can see it, as we return from our walk, with its
lamp shining through the window, a solitary beacon in the night.
These shifting and confused gusts of memory never lasted for more than a
few seconds; it often happened that, in my spell of uncertainty as to
where I was, I did not distinguish the successive theories of which that
uncertainty was composed any more than, when we watch a horse running, we
isolate the successive positions of its body as they appear upon a
bioscope. But I had seen first one and then another of the rooms in which
I had slept during my life, and in the end I would revisit them all in the
long course of my waking dream: rooms in winter, where on going to bed I
would at once bury my head in a nest, built up out of the most diverse
materials, the corner of my pillow, the top of my blankets, a piece of a
shawl, the edge of my bed, and a copy of an evening paper, all of which
things I would contrive, with the infinite patience 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.
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