In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

also like to
     thank Marina Van Zuylen and Odile Chilton for their ready responses to queries about
     gates, fences, women like pheasants, trees born on cliffs and other difficulties;
     Luke Sandford, who gave a close reading to ‘Combray’ ata late stage in the work; and especially Alan Cote, who so
     consistently helped me to resolve or gain perspective on the many larger questions
     that arose along the way.
    I am, finally, grateful to The Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund
     and The Lannan Foundation for their support during the period in which I worked on
     this translation.
    Lydia Davis

The Way by Swann’s
    For Monsieur Gaston Calmette
    As a token of profound

and affectionate gratitude.
    Marcel Proust

PART I :
Combray
1
    For a long time, I went to bed early. Sometimes, my candle scarcely out, my eyes would close so quickly that I did not have time to say to myself: ‘I’m falling asleep.’ And, half an hour later, the thought that it was time to try to sleep would wake me; I wanted to put down the book I thought I still had in my hands and blow out my light; I had not ceased while sleeping to form reflections on what I had just read, but these reflections had taken a rather peculiar turn; it seemed to me that I myself was what the book was talking about: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V. This belief lived on for a few seconds after my waking; it did not shock my reason but lay heavy like scales on my eyes and kept them from realizing that the candlestick was no longer lit. Then it began to grow unintelligible to me, as after metempsychosis do the thoughts of an earlier existence; the subject of the book detached itself from me, I was free to apply myself to it or not; immediately I recovered my sight and I was amazed to find a darkness around me soft and restful for my eyes, but perhaps even more so for my mind, to which it appeared a thing without cause, incomprehensible, a thing truly dark. I would ask myself what time it might be; I could hear the whistling of the trains which, remote or near by, like the singing of a bird in a forest, plotting the distances, described to me the extent of the deserted countryside where the traveller hastens towards the nearest station; and the little road he is following will be engraved on his memory by the excitement he owes to new places, to unaccustomed activities, to the recent conversation and the farewells under the unfamiliar lamp that follow him still through the silence of the night, to the imminent sweetness of his return.
    I would rest my cheeks tenderly against the lovely cheeks of the pillow, which, full and fresh, are like the cheeks of our childhood. I would strike a match to look at my watch. Nearly midnight. This is the hour when the sick man who has been obliged to go off on a journey and has had to sleep in an unfamiliar hotel, wakened by an attack, is cheered to see a ray of light under the door. How fortunate, it’s already morning! In a moment the servants will be up, he will be able to ring, someone will come to help him. The hope of being relieved gives him the courage to suffer. In fact he thought he heard footsteps; the steps approach, then recede. And the ray of light that was under his door has disappeared. It is midnight; they have just turned off the gas; the last servant has gone and he will have to suffer the whole night through without remedy.
    I would go back to sleep, and sometimes afterwards woke only briefly for a moment, long enough to hear the organic creak of the woodwork, open my eyes and stare at the kaleidoscope of the darkness, savour in a momentary glimmer of consciousness the sleep into which were plunged the furniture, the room, that whole of which I was only a small part and whose insensibility I would soon return to share. Or else while sleeping I had effortlessly returned to a for ever vanished period of my early life, rediscovered one of my childish terrors such as