This thread truly is the gift that keeps on giving.
“I’m a better translator than the Booker Prize-winning writer the French themselves honoured for their translations. Twice.” is definitely a keeper.
And no, it is:
For many years, it was my habit to retire early. At times, no sooner had the candle gone out than my eyelids closed so quickly I did not even register having fallen asleep
which is plodding, and
For a long time, I went to bed early. Sometimes, my candle scarcely out, my eyes would close so quickly that I did not have time to say to myself: “I’m falling asleep.”
that sounds fresh and exciting. “Habit”? “Retire”? OK, Grandpa. 
And why drag “eyelids” into it when “eyes” works just fine? Why say “hadn’t” but not “didn’t”?
And hers retains the inner monologue, whereas yours is just descriptive. With a plodding “register having fallen asleep”. And “my candle” is much more evocative than “the candle”, IMO.
Why subsitute “reincarnation” for her “metempsychosis” when you lose all the modern meaning of the use of the word in Continental philosophy that Proust was no doubt intending to evoke? He deliberately used la métempsycose and not la réincarnation, but you probably never even stopped to think why. Just didn’t want to use a word you didn’t understand.
And I only have first-year French, but even I know “a long time” is a much better translation of longtemps than “for many years” here, it retains the non-specificity, which reflects the mood.
Your writing reads like that of a longwinded autodidact. Funny, that…