uld 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