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 itself, but for the torture of
having to go to bed in it, had become quite endurable. For now I no longer
recognised it, and I became uneasy, as though I were in a room in some
hotel or furnished lodging, in a place where I had just arrived, by train,