, who
died years ago; and my body, the side upon which I was lying, loyally
preserving from the past an impression which my mind should never have
forgotten, brought back before my eyes the glimmering flame of the
night-light in its bowl of Bohemian glass, shaped like an urn and hung
by chains from the ceiling, and the chimney-piece of Siena marble in my
bedroom at Combray, in my great-aunt's house, in those far distant days
which, at the moment of waking, seemed present without being clearly
denned, but would become plainer in a little while when I was properly
awake.

Then would come up the memory of a fresh position; the wall slid away in
another direction; I was in my room in Mme. de Saint-Loup's house in the
country; good heavens, it must be ten o'clock, they will have finished
dinner! I must have overslept myself, in the little nap which I always
take when I come in from my walk with Mme. 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 wo