beating; until custom had changed the
colour of the curtains, made the clock keep quiet, brought an expression
of pity to the cruel, slanting face of the glass, disguised or even
completely dispelled the scent of flowering grasses, and distinctly
reduced the apparent loftiness of the ceiling. 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.

At Combray, as every afternoon ended, long before the time when I should
have to go up to bed, and to lie there, unsleeping, far from my
mother and grandmother, my bedroom became the fixed point on which my
melancholy and anxious thoughts were centred. Some one had had the happy
idea of giving me, to distract me on evenings when I seemed abnormally
wretched, a magic lantern, which used to be set on top of my lamp while
we waited for dinner-time to come: in the manner of the master-builders
and glass-painters of gothic days it substituted for the opaqueness
of my walls an impalpable iridescence, supernatural phenomena of many
colours, in which legends were depicted, as on a shifting and transitory
window. But my sorrows were only increased, because this change of
lighting destroyed, as nothing else could have done, the customary
impression I had formed of my room, thanks to which the room i