e gone to sleep with a maddening toothache and are conscious of it
only as a little girl whom we attempt, time after time, to pull out
of the water, or as a line of Moliere which we repeat incessantly to
ourselves, it is a great relief to wake up, so that our intelligence
can disentangle the idea of toothache from any artificial semblance of
heroism or rhythmic cadence. It was the precise converse of this relief
which I felt when my anguish at having to go up to my room invaded my
consciousness in a manner infinitely more rapid, instantaneous almost,
a manner at once insidious and brutal as I breathed in--a far more
poisonous thing than any moral penetration--the peculiar smell of the
varnish upon that staircase.

Once in my room I had to stop every loophole, to close the shutters, to
dig my own grave as I turned down the bed-clothes, to wrap myself in the
shroud of my nightshirt. But before burying myself in the iron bed which
had been placed there because, on summer nights, I was too hot among the
rep curtains of the four-poster, I was stirred to revolt, and attempted
the desperate stratagem of a condemned prisoner. I wrote to my mother
begging her to come upstairs for an important reason which I could not
put in writing. My fear was that Francoise, my aunt's cook who used to
be put in charge of me when I was at Combray, might refuse to take my
note. I had a suspicion that, in her eyes, to carry a message to
my mother when there was a stranger in the room would appear flatly
inconceivable, just as it would be for the door-keeper of a theatre
to hand a letter to an actor upon the stage. For things which might
or might not be done she possessed a code at once imperious, abundant,
subtle, and uncompromising on points themselves imperceptible or
irrelevant, which gave it a resemblance to those ancient laws which
combine such cruel ordinances as the massacre of infants at the breast
with prohibitions, of exaggerated refinement, against "seething the kid
in his mother's milk," or "eating of the sinew which is upon the hollow
of the thigh." This code, if one could judge it by the sudden obstinacy
which she would put into her refusal to carry out certain of our
instructions, seemed to have foreseen such social complications and
refinements of fashion as nothing in Francoise's surroundings or in her
career as a servant in a village household could have put into her head;
and we were obliged to assume that there was latent in he