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By Root 1602 0

What I saw almost invariably in my mind’s eye when I thought of Balbec were the hours which, every morning during the fine weather, since I was due to go out in the afternoon with Albertine and her friends, my grandmother, following the doctor’s orders, insisted on my spending lying down with the room darkened. The manager gave instructions that no noise was to be made on my landing, and came up himself to see that they were obeyed. Because the light outside was so strong, I kept drawn for as long as possible the big violet curtains which had adopted so hostile an attitude towards me the first evening. But since, in spite of the pins with which Françoise fastened them every night so that the light should not enter, and which she alone knew how to unfasten, in spite of the rugs, the red cretonne table-cover, the various fabrics collected here and there which she fitted into her defensive scheme, she never succeeded in making them meet exactly, the darkness was not complete, and they spilled over the carpet as it were a scarlet shower of anemone-petals, which I could not resist the temptation to trample for a moment with my bare feet. And on the wall which faced the window and so was partially lighted, a cylinder of gold with no visible support was placed vertically and moved slowly along like the pillar of fire which went before the Hebrews in the desert. I went back to bed; obliged to taste without moving, in imagination only, and all at once, the pleasures of games, bathing, walks which the morning prompted, joy made my heart beat thunderingly like a machine set going at full speed but fixed to the ground, which can spend its energy only by turning over on itself.

I knew that my friends were on the front, but I did not see them as they passed before the links of the sea’s uneven chain, at the far end of which, perched amid its bluish peaks like an Italian citadel, could occasionally be distinguished, in clear weather, the little town of Rivebelle, picked out in minutest detail by the sun. I did not see my friends, but (while there mounted to my belvedere the shout of the newsboys, the “journalists” as Françoise used to call them, the shouts of the bathers and of children at play, punctuating like the cries of sea-birds the sough of the gently breaking waves) I guessed their presence, I heard their laughter enveloped like the laughter of the Nereids in the soft surge of sound that rose to my ears. “We looked up,” said Albertine in the evening, “to see if you were coming down. But your shutters were still closed when the concert began.” At ten o’clock, sure enough, it broke out beneath my windows. In the intervals between the blare of the instruments, if the tide were high, the gliding surge of a wave would be heard again, slurred and continuous, seeming to enfold the notes of the violin in its crystal spirals and to be spraying its foam over the intermittent echoes of a submarine music. I grew impatient because no one had yet come with my things, so that I might get up and dress. Twelve o’clock struck, and Françoise arrived at last. And for months on end, in this Balbec to which I had so looked forward because I imagined it only as battered by storms and buried in the mist, the weather had been so dazzling and so unchanging that when she came to open the window I could always, without once being wrong, expect to see the same patch of sunlight folded in the corner of the outer wall, of an unalterable colour which was less moving as a sign of summer than depressing as the colour of a lifeless and factitious enamel. And when Françoise removed the pins from the top of the window-frame, took down the cloths, and drew back the curtains, the summer day which she disclosed seemed as dead, as immemorial, as a sumptuous millenary mummy from which our old servant had done no more than cautiously unwind the linen wrappings before displaying it, embalmed in its vesture of gold.

NOTES · ADDENDA · SYNOPSIS

Notes

Le seize mai: constitutional crisis in 1877 which eventually led to the resignation of the President of the Republic,