The Swann Way by Marcel Proust & Brian Nelson & Adam Watt

Author:Marcel Proust & Brian Nelson & Adam Watt [Proust, Marcel & Nelson, Brian & Watt, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2023-07-05T00:00:00+00:00

Part Three

Place Names: The Name

Of all the bedrooms I pictured to myself as I lay awake at night, none was less like the rooms in Combray, powdery with a grainy, pollenated, almost edible atmosphere, redolent of piety, than the room at the Grand-Hôtel de la Plage at Balbec, whose enamel-painted walls contained, like the polished sides of a swimming pool that tint the water blue, a pure, azure air, smelling slightly of sea salt. The Bavarian decorator charged with fitting out the hotel had used different design schemes for the various rooms, and along three sides of the room I happened to occupy he’d set low bookcases with glass fronts, whose panes, depending on where they stood, and by an effect he hadn’t foreseen, reflected this or that section of the ever-changing spectacle of the sea, unfurling a frieze of bright seascapes, interrupted only by the mahogany of the shelves. The result was that the whole room looked like one of those model dormitories featured in ‘modern style’* home exhibitions, which are hung with works of art thought likely to appeal to the person who will be sleeping there, and representing subjects in keeping with the kind of site where the dwelling will be built.

Nor was there anything less like the real Balbec than the one I’d often imagined on stormy days when the wind was so strong that Françoise, when she took me to the Champs-Élysées, would warn me not to walk too close to the houses for fear that a flying tile would land on my head, and would recount, groaning the while, the many shipwrecks and natural disasters reported in the newspapers. I would have liked nothing more than to contemplate a storm at sea, not so much because it would be a beautiful spectacle as because it would be a momentary revelation of the real workings of Nature; or rather, the only spectacles I found truly beautiful were the ones which I knew were not artificially contrived for my entertainment, but were necessary and unchangeable — the beauty of a landscape or of a great work of art. I was curious and eager to know only what I believed to be more real than myself, things whose value for me was that they gave me a glimpse into the mind of a great genius, or of the power and grace of Nature as she appeared when left to herself, without human interference. Just as it would be no consolation for the death of our mother to have nothing but the beautiful sound of her voice on a gramophone record, so a mechanical imitation of a storm would have left me as cold as the illuminated fountains at the Exposition.* And to ensure that the storm would be absolutely real, I also wanted the shore itself to be a natural shore, not a jetty recently created by a municipality. In fact, because of all the feelings it aroused in me, nature struck me as the diametrical opposite of all the mechanical creations of men.

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