Swann's Way

would break out again in flame: in a sort of alcove without walls, a
cave of warmth dug out of the heart of the room itself, a zone of heat
whose boundaries were constantly shifting and altering in temperature
as gusts of air ran across them to strike freshly upon my face, from
the corners of the room, or from parts near the window or far from the
fireplace which had therefore remained cold--or rooms in summer, where
I would delight to feel myself a part of the warm evening, where the
moonlight striking upon the half-opened shutters would throw down to the
foot of my bed its enchanted ladder; where I would fall asleep, as it
might be in the open air, like a titmouse which the breeze keeps poised
in the focus of a sunbeam--or sometimes the Louis XVI room, so cheerful
that I could never feel really unhappy, even on my first night in it:
that room where the slender columns which lightly supported its ceiling
would part, ever so gracefully, to indicate where the bed was and
to keep it separate; sometimes again that little room with the high
ceiling, hollowed in the form of a pyramid out of two separate storeys,
and partly walled with mahogany, in which from the first moment my mind