s she smoothed away, as she read on, any harshness there might be
or discordance in the tenses of verbs, endowing the imperfect and the
preterite with all the sweetness which there is in generosity, all the
melancholy which there is in love; guided the sentence that was drawing
to an end towards that which was waiting to begin, now hastening, now
slackening the pace of the syllables so as to bring them, despite their
difference of quantity, into a uniform rhythm, and breathed into this
quite ordinary prose a kind of life, continuous and full of feeling.

My agony was soothed; I let myself be borne upon the current of this
gentle night on which I had my mother by my side. I knew that such a
night could not be repeated; that the strongest desire I had in the
world, namely, to keep my mother in my room through the sad hours of
darkness, ran too much counter to general requirements and to the wishes
of others for such a concession as had been granted me this evening to
be anything but a rare and casual exception. To-morrow night I should
again be the victim of anguish and Mamma would not stay by my side. But
when these storms of anguish grew calm I could no longer realise
their existence; besides, tomorrow evening was still a long way off;
I reminded myself that I should still have time to think about things,
albeit that remission of time could bring me no access of power, albeit
the coming event was in no way dependent upon the exercise of my will,
and seemed not quite inevitable only because it was still separated from
me by this short interval.

* * *

And so it was that, for a long time afterwards, when I lay awake at
night and revived old memories of Combray, I saw no more of it than
this sort of luminous panel, sharply defined against a vague and shadowy
background, like the panels which a Bengal fire or some electric sign
will illuminate and dissect from the front of a building the other
parts of which remain plunged in darkness: broad enough at its base, the
little parlour, the dining-room, the alluring shadows of the path along
which would come M. Swann, the unconscious author of my sufferings, the
hall through which I would journey to the first step of that staircase,
so hard to climb, which constituted, all by itself, the tapering
'elevation' of an irregular pyramid; and, at the summit, my bedroom,
with the little passage through whose glazed door Mamma would enter;
in a word, seen always at the same ev