In Search of Lost Time, Volume I: Swann’s Way

In Search of Lost Time, Volume I: Swann’s Way

To M. Gaston Calmette.

As a token of profound

and affectionate gratitude.

COMBRAY

For a long time I used to go to bed early. Sometimes, scarcely had I put out my candle when my eyes would close so quickly that I had no time to say to myself: “I’m falling asleep.” And half an hour later, the thought that it was time to seek sleep would awaken me; I would want to put down the book I imagined I still had in my hands and blow out my light; while asleep I had gone on reflecting on what I had just read, but those reflections had taken a rather peculiar turn; it seemed to me that I myself was what the book was about: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between Francis I and Charles V. This belief survived for a few seconds after I awoke; it did not offend my reason, but lay like scales upon my eyes and prevented them from realizing that the candlestick was no longer lit. Then it would begin to become unintelligible to me, like the thoughts of a former existence after metempsychosis; the subject of the book detached itself from me, I was free to apply myself to it or not; at once I recovered my sight and was greatly astonished to find around me a darkness, gentle and restful to my eyes, but perhaps even more so to my mind, to which it appeared as something causeless, incomprehensible, something truly obscure. I wondered what time it could be; I heard the whistle of trains, which, nearer or farther away, like the song of a bird in a forest, marking out the distances, described to me the extent of the deserted countryside where the traveler hurries toward the next station; and the little path he follows will be engraved upon his memory by the excitement he owes to new places, unfamiliar actions, recent conversation and farewells beneath a strange lamp that still pursue him in the silence of the night, and to the approaching sweetness of his return.

I pressed my cheeks tenderly against the lovely cheeks of the pillow, which, full and cool, are like the cheeks of our childhood. I struck a match to look at my watch. Nearly midnight. It is the hour when the sick man, obliged to go on a journey and forced to sleep in an unfamiliar hotel, awakened by an attack, rejoices on seeing a strip of daylight beneath the door. What happiness, it is morning already! In a moment the servants will be up, he can ring, someone will come and help him. The hope of relief gives him courage to endure his pain. Just then he thinks he hears footsteps; the steps come nearer, then recede. And the strip of daylight beneath his door has vanished. It is midnight; someone has just turned out the gas; the last servant has gone away and he will have to remain all night suffering without relief.

I would fall asleep again, and sometimes had only brief awakenings of an instant, long enough to hear the organic creaking of the woodwork, to open my eyes and gaze at the kaleidoscope of darkness, to savor, through a momentary gleam of consciousness, the sleep in which the furniture, the room, the whole of which I was only a small part, lay immersed, and to whose insensibility I would quickly return and merge myself. Or else, while asleep, I had effortlessly rejoined an age forever vanished from my primitive life, rediscovered one of my childish terrors, such as that my great-uncle would pull me by my curls, a terror dispelled on the day—a date marking for me the beginning of a new era—when they were cut. I had forgotten that event in my sleep, and recovered the memory of it as soon as I had managed to wake in order to escape my great-uncle’s hands; but as a precaution I would wrap my head completely in my pillow before returning to the world of dreams.