Swann's Way

sufficient impressions to enable it to identify the room, it, my body,
would recall from each room in succession what the bed was like, where
the doors were, how daylight came in at the windows, whether there was a
passage outside, what I had had in my mind when I went to sleep, and had
found there when I awoke. The stiffened side underneath my body would,
for instance, in trying to fix its position, imagine itself to be lying,
face to the wall, in a big bed with a canopy; and at once I would say to
myself, "Why, I must have gone to sleep after all, and Mamma never came
to say good night!" for I was in the country with my grandfather, who
died years ago; and my body, the side upon which I was lying, loyally
preserving from the past an impression which my mind should never have
forgotten, brought back before my eyes the glimmering flame of the
night-light in its bowl of Bohemian glass, shaped like an urn and hung
by chains from the ceiling, and the chimney-piece of Siena marble in my
bedroom at Combray, in my great-aunt's house, in those far distant days
which, at the moment of waking, seemed present without being clearly
penned, but would become plainer in a little while when I was properly