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, Doncieres, 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.
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