staircase 'against my heart,' as the saying is, climbing in opposition to
my heart's desire, which was to return to my mother, since she had not, by
her kiss, given my heart leave to accompany me forth. That hateful
staircase, up which I always passed with such dismay, gave out a smell of
varnish which had to some extent absorbed, made definite and fixed the
special quality of sorrow that I felt each evening, and made it perhaps
even more cruel to my sensibility because, when it assumed this olfactory
guise, my intellect was powerless to resist it. When we have gone to sleep
with a maddening toothache and are conscious of it only as a little girl
whom we attempt, time after time, to pull out of the water, or as a line
of Moliere which we repeat incessantly to ourselves, it is a great relief
to wake up, so that our intelligence can disentangle the idea of toothache
from any artificial semblance of heroism or rhythmic cadence. It was the
precise converse of this relief which I felt when my anguish at having to
go up to my room invaded my consciousness in a manner infinitely more
rapid, instantaneous almost, a manner at once insidious and brutal as I
breathed in--a far more poisonous thing than any moral penetration--the
peculiar smell of the varnish upon that staircase.

Once in my room I had to stop every loophole, to close the shutters, to
dig my own grave as I turned down the bed-clothes, to wrap myself in the
shroud of my nightshirt. But before burying myself in the iron bed which
had been placed there because, on summer nights, I was too hot among the
rep curtains of the four-poster, I was stirred to revolt, and attempted
the desperate stratagem of a condemned prisoner. I wrote to my mother
begging her to come upstairs for an important reason which I could not put
in writing. My fear was that Francoise, my aunt's cook who used to be put
in charge of me when I was at Combray, might refuse to take my note. I had
a suspicion that, in her eyes, to carry a message to my mother when there
was a stranger in the room would appear flatly inconceivable, just as it