Admittedly, I was wide awake now, my body had turned one last time and the good angel of certainty had stopped everything around me, I was lying under my covers in my room, and had set about their place in darkness my dresser, my desk, my fireplace, the window on the street and two doors. But though I knew that I was not in the homes whose ignorance of waking me in an instant if the image presented is separate at least to believe may be present, the motion was given to my memory; generally I was not looking to go back to sleep right away, I spent most of the night to remind me of our old life at Combray with my great-aunt, at Balbec, Paris, Doncieres in Venice elsewhere, to remember the places, people I had known what I had seen them, what they had told me.

At Combray, every day at the end of the afternoon, long before the time should go to bed and stay without sleep, away from my mother and my grandmother, my bedroom was again the fixed point and painful of my concerns. We had to invent, to distract me on evenings when they found me look too unhappy to give me a magic lantern, which, until dinner time, we wore my lamp, and, like the first architects and master craftsmen of the Gothic age, she substituted for the opaqueness of the walls of impalpable iridescence, supernatural apparitions of multicolored, where legends were depicted as in a window flickering and momentary. But my sadness was not qu’accrue, because nothing that the change of lighting destroyed the habit I had of my room and thanks to which, except the punishment of the bed, she became me bearable. Now I no longer recognized and I was worried, as in a hotel room or “cottage”, where I had arrived for the first time down the railway.