Publisher's Synopsis
AT daybreak, my face still turned to the wall, and before I had seen above the big innercurtains what tone the first streaks of light assumed, I could already tell what sort of day itwas. The first sounds from the street had told me, according to whether they came to myears dulled and distorted by the moisture of the atmosphere or quivering like arrows in theresonant and empty area of a spacious, crisply frozen, pure morning; as soon as I heard therumble of the first tramcar, I could tell whether it was sodden with rain or setting forth intothe blue. And perhaps these sounds had themselves been forestalled by some swifter andmore pervasive emanation which, stealing into my slumber, diffused in it a melancholy thatseemed to presage snow, or gave utterance (through the lips of a little person whooccasionally reappeared there) to so many hymns to the glory of the sun that, having firstof all begun to smile in my sleep, having prepared my eyes, behind their shut lids, to bedazzled, I awoke finally amid deafening strains of music. It was, moreover, principally frommy bedroom that I took in the life of the outer world during this period. I know that Blochreported that, when he called to see me in the evenings, he could hear the sound ofconversation; as my mother was at Combray and he never found anybody in my room, heconcluded that I was talking to myself.
