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Unhappily those marvellous places, railway stations, from which one sets out for a remote destination, are tragic places also, for if in them the miracle is accomplished whereby scenes which hitherto have had no existence save in our minds are about to become the scenes among which we shall be living, for that very reason we must, as we emerge from the waiting-room, abandon any thought of presently finding ourselves once more in the familiar room which but a moment ago still housed us. We must lay aside all hope of going home to sleep in our own bed, once we have decided to penetrate into the pestiferous cavern through which we gain access to the mystery, into one of those vast, glass-roofed sheds, like that of Saint-Lazare into which I went to find the train for Balbec, and which extended over the eviscerated city one of those bleak and boundless skies, heavy with an accumulation of dramatic menace, like certain skies painted with an almost Parisian modernity by Mantegna or Veronese, beneath which only some terrible and solemn act could be in process, such as a departure by train or the erection of the Cross.

So long as I had been content to look out from the warmth of my own bed in Paris at the Persian church of Balbec, shrouded in driving sleet, no sort of objection to this journey had been offered by my body. Its objections began only when it realised that it would be of the party, and that on the evening of my arrival I should be shown to “my” room which would be unknown to it. Its revolt was all the more profound in that on the very eve of my departure I learned that my mother would not be coming with us, my father, who would be kept busy at the Ministry until it was time for him to set off for Spain with M. de Norpois, having preferred to take a house in the neighbourhood of Paris. On the other hand, the contemplation of Balbec seemed to me none the less desirable because I must purchase it at the price of a discomfort which, on the contrary, seemed to me to symbolise and to guarantee the reality of the impression which I was going there to seek, an impression which no allegedly equivalent spectacle, no “panorama” which I might have gone to see without being thereby precluded from returning home to sleep in my own bed, could possibly have replaced. It was not for the first time that I felt that those who love and those who enjoy are not always the same. I believed that I hankered after Balbec just as much as the doctor who was treating me and who said to me on the morning of our departure, surprised to see me looking so unhappy: “I don’t mind telling you that if I could only manage a week to go down and get a blow by the sea, I shouldn’t have to be asked twice. You’ll be having races, regattas, it will be delightful.” But I had already learned the lesson—long before I was taken to see Berma—that, whatever it might be that I loved, it would never be attained, save at the end of a long and painful pursuit, in the course of which I should have first to sacrifice my pleasure to that paramount good instead of seeking it therein.

My grandmother, naturally enough, looked upon our exodus from a somewhat different point of view, and (anxious as ever that the presents which were made me should take some artistic form) had planned, in order to offer me a “print” of this journey that was old in part, for us to repeat, partly by rail and partly by road, the itinerary that Mme de Sévigné had followed when she went from Paris to “L’Orient” by way of Chaulnes and “the Pont-Audemer.” But my grandmother had been obliged to abandon this project at the instance of my father, who knew, whenever she organised any expedition with a view to extracting from it the utmost intellectual benefit that it was capable of yielding, what could be anticipated in missed trains, lost luggage, sore throats and broken rules. She was free at least to rejoice in the thought that never, when the time came for us to sally forth to the beach, would we be exposed to the risk of being kept indoors by the sudden appearance of what her beloved Sévign