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its stony solidity from the unlikely source of a ‘mauve satinette’ lining. Bringing together different forms of artisanship (as he did in Swann’s Way, comparing Françoise’s efforts with cuts of beef to Michelangelo’s labours with blocks of marble), Proust encourages readers to think on different levels at once, to consider the small scale and the soaring and to see what they share. When we encounter such images (and there are many) in the Search, and pause to trace their logic and interconnections, our actions are analogous to those of the Narrator and the artist in the image he creates. ‘I should construct my book,’ the Narrator remarks in the closing stages of the novel, ‘I dare not say ambitiously like a cathedral, but quite simply like a dress’ (TR, 432; 2390); the cathedral image just examined nuances this apparent modesty. Structural beauty in nature is also celebrated in Within a Budding Grove, when a ‘gigantic fish’ the Narrator is served is described as being constructed ‘like a polychrome cathedral of the deep’ (BG, 315–16; JF, 551).

‘Place-names: The Place’ begins with a bold chronological gear-change: we jump forward two years to a point when the Narrator, having ‘arrived at a state of almost complete indifference to Gilberte’ (BG, 253; JF, 511), travels to Balbec. In the place-name we hear the first syllable of Albertine’s name, whose life, thereafter, is ineradicably linked to his own. The trip is an important step in the Narrator’s personal development as it is his first extended absence from his mother. He is accompanied, however, by Françoise and his grandmother, whose knocks on the partition wall between their rooms reassure him of her presence when he is alone and coming to terms with their new circumstances at the Grand Hotel. On the train approaching Balbec the Narrator has a highly instructive experience; as the sun rises, a pink colour fills the sky:

It brightened; the sky turned to a glowing pink which I strove, glueing my eyes to the window, to see more clearly, for I felt that it was related somehow to the most intimate life of Nature, but, the course of the line altering, the train turned, the morning scene gave place in the frame of the window to a nocturnal village … beneath a firmament still spangled with all its stars, and I was lamenting the loss of my strip of pink sky when I caught sight of it anew, but red this time, in the opposite window which it left at a second bend in the line; so that I spent my time running from one window to the other to reassemble, to collect on a single canvas the intermittent, antipodean fragments of my fine, scarlet, ever-changing morning, and to obtain a comprehensive view and a continuous picture of it. (BG, 268; JF, 520–1)

This powerfully visual entry into Balbec announces the painterly preoccupations developed there. The scene memorably illustrates how we can experience time seemingly moving at different speeds at once. The train travels at one speed on a roughly horizontal axis while on a vertical axis, at a different speed, the rising sun performs its daily spectacle of turning darkness into light. Into this scene Proust introduces the movement of his ever-curious Narrator dashing back and forth, trying once again, quite literally, to ‘see more clearly into the sources of his rapture’. One single, capacious sentence gathers this all in, just as the Narrator in that very sentence – and over the longer duration of the novel itself – seeks to piece together fragmentary impressions into a ‘comprehensive’ and ‘continuous’ view.

Raptures of this sort are balanced by disappointments of a kind with which we are now familiar: the Balbec church does not cling to a cliff, battered by squalls and sea spray as the Narrator had imagined, but, situated inland at Balbec-en-Terre, is found among the unpoetic surroundings of a savings bank and the omnibus office (BG, 274; JF, 524). Blinkered by this discovery (the shock of the real, we might say), he gazes with indifference on the statuary so long anticipated; it is not until Elstir explains its accomplishments