absence of expeditions with Albertine, the random course of my solitary reflexions furnished me at times with some of those tiny fragments of the truth which attract to themselves, like a magnet, an inkling of the unknown, which from that moment becomes painful. Even if one lives under the equivalent of a bell jar, associations of ideas, memories, continue to act upon us. But these internal shocks did not occur immediately; no sooner had Albertine set off on her drive than I was revivified, if only for a few moments, by the exhilarating virtues of solitude. I took my share in the pleasures of the new day; the arbitrary desire—the capricious and purely solipsistic impulse—to savour them would not have sufficed to place them within my reach, had not the particular state of the weather not merely evoked for me their past images but affirmed their present reality, immediately accessible to all men whom a contingent and consequently negligible circumstance did not compel to remain at home. On certain fine days, the weather was so cold, one was in such full communication with the street, that it seemed as though the outer walls of the house had been dismantled, and, whenever a tramcar passed, the sound of its bell reverberated like that of a silver knife striking a house of glass. But it was above all in myself that I heard, with rapture, a new sound emitted by the violin within. Its strings are tautened or relaxed by mere differences in the temperature or the light outside. Within our being, an instrument which the uniformity of habit has rendered mute, song is born of these divergences, these variations, the source of all music: the change of weather on certain days makes us pass at once from one note to another. We recapture the forgotten tune the mathematical necessity of which we might have deduced, and which for the first few moments we sing without recognising it. These modifications alone, internal though they had come from without, gave me a fresh vision of the external world. Communicating doors, long barred, reopened in my brain. The life of certain towns, the gaiety of certain excursions, resumed their place in my consciousness. With my whole being quivering around the vibrating string, I would have sacrificed my dim former existence and my life to come, erased by the india-rubber of habit, for a state so unique.
If I had not gone out with Albertine on her long expedition, my mind would stray all the further afield, and, because I had refused to savour with my senses this particular morning, I enjoyed in imagination all the similar mornings, past or possible, or more precisely a certain type of morning of which all those of the same kind were but the intermittent apparition which I had at once recognised; for the sharp air blew the book open of its own accord at the right page, and I found before me, already marked, so that I might follow it from my bed, the Gospel for the day. This ideal morning filled my mind full of a permanent reality identical with all similar mornings, and infected me with a joyousness which my physical debility did not diminish: for, a sense of well-being resulting far less from the soundness of our health than from the surplus of our energies, we can achieve it just as well by restricting the scope of our activity as by increasing our strength. The activity with which I was overflowing and which I kept constantly charged as I lay in bed, made me pulsate and leap internally, like a machine which, prevented from moving from its position, turns over on itself.
Françoise would come in to light the fire, and in order to make it draw, would throw upon it a handful of twigs, the scent of which, forgotten for a year past, traced round the fireplace a magic circle within which, glimpsing myself poring over a book, now at Combray, now at Doncières, I was as joyful, while remaining in my bedroom in Paris, as if I had been on the point of setting out for a walk along the Méséglise way, or of going to join Saint-Loup and his friends on manoeuvres. It often happens that the pleasure which everyone takes