straight out of a Merovingian past
ner of the room, cleared for itself a site I had not
looked to find tenanted in the quiet surroundings of my normal field of vision: that room in which
my mind, forcing itself for hours on end to leave its moorings, to elongate itself upwards so as to
take on the exact shape of the room, and to reach to the summit of that monstrous funnel, had
passed so many anxious nights while my body lay stretched out in bed, my eyes staring upwards,
my ears straining, my nostrils sniffing uneasily, and my heart 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
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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 腕時計通販 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 サッカーシューズ 激安 the night recalling our life in the old days at Combray
with my great-aunt, at Balbec, Paris, Doncières, 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, for the first time.
Riding at a jerky trot, Golo, his mind filled with an infamous design, issued from the little three-
cornered forest which dyed dark-green the slope of a convenient hill, and advanced by leaps and
bounds towards the castle of poor Geneviève de Brabant. This castle was cut off short by a curved
line which was in fact the circumference of one of the transparent ovals in the slides which were
pushed into position キャンパス スニーカー through a slot in the lantern. It was only the wing of a castle, and in front of it
stretched a moor on which Geneviève stood, lost in contemplation, wearing a blue girdle. The
castle and the moor were yellow, but I could tell their colour without waiting to see them, for
before the slides made their appearance the old-gold sonorous name of Brabant had given me an
unmistakable clue. Golo stopped for a moment and listened sadly to the little speech read aloud by
my great-aunt, which he seemed perfectly to understand, for he modified his attitude with a
docility not devoid of a degree of majesty, so as to conform to the indications given in the text;
then he rode away at the same jerky trot. And nothing could arrest his slow progress. If the lantern
were moved I could still distinguish Golo’s horse advancing across the window-curtains, swelling
out with their curves and diving into their folds. The body of Golo himself, being of the same
supernatural substance as his steed’s, overcame all material obstacles–everything that seemed レディース 長財布 激安 to
bar his way–by taking each as it might be a skeleton and embodying it in himself: the door-handle,
for instance, over which, adapting itself at once, would float invincibly his red cloak or his pale
face, never losing its nobility or its melancholy, never shewing any sign of trouble at such a
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transubstantiation.
And, indeed, I found plenty of charm in these bright projections, which seemed to have come
straight out of a Merovingian past, and to shed around me the reflections of such ancient history.
But I cannot express the discomfort I felt at such an intrusion of mystery and beauty into a room
which I had succeeded in filling with my own personality until I thought no more of the room than
of myself. The anaesthetic effect of custom being destroyed, I would begin to think and to feel
very melancholy things. The door-handle of my room, which was different to me from all the
other doorhandles in the world, inasmuch as it seemed to open of its own accord and without my
having to turn it, so unconscious had its manipulation become; lo and behold, it was now a
