For many years, especially before his marriage, even though Monsieur Swann, the son, often came to visit at Combray, my great aunt and grandparents never suspected he no longer moved at all in the society his family had frequented and that, behind a kind of incognito created in us by the familiar name Swann, they were sheltering—with the perfect innocence of honest hoteliers that have among them, unwittingly, a celebrated brigand—one of the most elegant members of the Jockey Club, a favored friend of the Comte de Paris and the Prince of Wales, one of the most pampered high-society men of Faubourg Saint-Germain.

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We’d all wait in suspense for the news my grandmother brought us of the enemy, as if we could choose from a great number of possible assailants, and soon enough my grandfather would say: “I know that voice, it’s Swann.” We wouldn’t have recognized Swann but for his voice, actually, we only poorly made out his face, with its hooked nose, its green eyes, beneath a high forehead ringed by blond, almost red hair, worn Bressant-style, because we’d keep the garden lights low as possible in order not to attract mosquitoes, and I’d steal away discreetly to request that the sirops be brought out; my grandmother, believing it courteous, insisted no one should appear to go to any extra trouble, just on account of these visits.

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My only consolation, when I’d go up to my room, was that Maman would come and kiss me once I was in bed. But this goodnight would last so little time, she’d go back downstairs so fast, that when I’d hear her climbing up, then hear at the hallway’s double doors the gentle rustle of her blue muslin garden dress, from which would hang little cords of woven straw, it would be for me a sorrowful moment.

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When these garden walks of my grandmother’s took place after dinner, one thing had the power to bring her back; this was—at a moment when the revolutions of her walk would return her periodically, like an insect, near the lights of the little salon where the liqueurs would be served on the card table—if my great aunt called to her, “Bathilde! Come stop your husband from drinking the cognac!” To make fun of her, in fact (she’d brought into my father’s family such a different sort of spirit that everyone would tease her and torment her), since liqueurs were forbidden for my grandfather, my great aunt would make him drink a few drops.

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After dinner, alas, I’d soon be obliged to leave Maman, who’d stay to chat with the others, in the garden if the weather were fine, in the little salon where everyone retired if the weather instead were bad. Everyone, that is, except my grandmother, who thought “it’s a pity to stay shut in in the country” and who’d have incessant discussions with my father, on days it rained too hard, when he’d send me to read in my room instead of my staying outside.

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Of course I’d see some charm in these brilliant projections that seemed to emanate from a Merovingian past and cast reflections of such an ancient story around me. But all the same I cannot describe what misery it would cause me, this intrusion of mystery and beauty in a room I had finally filled with my self, to the point of no longer paying attention to the space, but to me.

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Driving his horse with jolting steps, Golo, flush with a frightful plan, set forth from the little triangle of forest that spread like deep green velvet on the slope of a hill, and advanced by leaps toward the castle of poor Geneviève de Brabant. This castle was cut off by a curving line that was none other than the edge of an oval of glass lodged in the frame slid between slots on the lantern.

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At Combray, each day near afternoon’s end, long before the moment came to put myself to bed and lie there, sleepless, far from my mother and grandmother, my bedroom would become once more the fixed and painful point of my preoccupations. The grownups had even devised a ruse, to distract me on evenings when I looked too unhappy, of giving me a magic lantern, with which, while waiting for dinner, they would cover my lamp; and, echoing the early architects and glass-masters of the gothic age, the lantern replaced the walls’ opacity with impalpable iridescence, with supernatural multicolored apparitions, depicting legends as if in a flickering and ephemeral stained-glass window.

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Of course I’d be wide awake now, my body would turn one last time, and the good angel of certitude would halt the things around me, would settle me under my blankets, in my room, and in the darkness put in their approximate places my dresser, my desk, my fireplace, the street-facing window and the two doors. But however well I knew I was not in the homes my waking ignorance had presented in an instant, as distinct images, implying at least their possible presence, my memory would be set in motion; I generally wouldn’t try to sleep again at once; I’d pass most of the night remembering our life of old, at Combray chez my great aunt, at Balbec, in Paris, in Doncières, in Venice, and many more, remembering these places, the people I’d known in them, what I’d seen in them, what others had told me about them.

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These wheeling and confused evocations never lasted longer than some seconds; often, my brief uncertainty of where I was wouldn’t single out one or the other of the diverse suppositions it was made from, just as we cannot isolate, watching a running horse, the successive positions a kinetoscope can show us. But I’d review now one, now another of the rooms I’d inhabited in my life, and I’d end up recalling them all in the drawn-out daydreams that followed my waking; winter rooms, where when in bed, I’d nuzzle my head in a nest that I’d braid from the most disparate things; a corner of pillow, the top of the cover, a piece of shawl, the side of the bed, and a pink-papered issue of Débats, all of which I’d end up cementing together per the technique of birds, adding on infinitely; where in an icy cold the pleasure I’d savor was feeling separate from the outdoors (like the sea swallow who has its nest at the base of a tunnel in the heat of the earth), and where, the fire being stoked all night in the chimney, I’d sleep as if under a great cloak of hot, hazy air, lit by the glimmers of embers reigniting, a kind of impalpable alcove, a warm cave dug in the heart of the room itself, a zone with burning, mobile thermal contours, with puffs of air that refreshed the face coming cooled from the corners, from places near the window or far from the fire;—summer rooms, where I’d love to be one with the temperate night, where moonlight, pressed through half-open shutters, cast at the foot of the bed its luminous ladder, where I’d sleep in almost open air, like the chickadee balanced on a breeze at the tip of a sunray—; sometimes the Louis Sixteenth room, so cheerful that even the first evening there I was not too unhappy, and where columns that lightly supported the ceiling stood with great grace to reveal and reserve the place of the bed; this same room sometimes, on the contrary, too tight, with too-high ceilings hollowed in the shape of a pyramid two stories tall, partially clad in mahogany, where from the first second I was morally poisoned by the unknown odor of vetiver, convinced of the hostility of the purple curtains, and of the insolent indifference of the clock clacking harshly, as if I weren’t there;—where a strange and merciless mirror with quadrangular feet, obliquely blocking one corner of the room, gouged into the gentle plenitude of my usual field of vision an unexpected space; where my thoughts, striving for hours to break loose, to stretch high to take on the precise shape of the room and manage to fill to the brim its gigantic funnel, had endured so many hard nights, while I lay in bed, eyes raised, ear anxious, nostril restive, heart hammering; until habit at last changed the color of the curtains, hushed the clock, taught mercy to the oblique and cruel mirror, covered, if not completely cleared, the odor of vetiver, and noticeably lowered the apparent height of the ceiling.

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