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anything, timid-seeming but full of romance, hiding from
every eye some imperishable secret of happiness and disen-
chantment. That land which knows not truth,’ he continued
with Machiavellian subtlety, ‘that land of infinite fiction
makes bad reading for any boy; and is certainly not what
I should choose or recommend for my young friend here,
who is already so much inclined to melancholy, for a heart
already predisposed to receive its impressions. Climates that
breathe amorous secrets and futile regrets may agree with
an old and disillusioned man like myself; but they must al-
ways prove fatal to a temperament which is still unformed.
Believe me,’ he went on with emphasis, ‘the waters of that
bay—more Breton than Norman—may exert a sedative in-
fluence, though even that is of questionable value, upon a
heart which, like mine, is no longer unbroken, a heart for
whose wounds there is no longer anything to compensate.
But at your age, my boy, those waters are contra-indicated....
Good night to you, neighbours,’ he added, moving away
from us with that evasive abruptness to which we were ac-
customed; and then, turning towards us, with a phy-sicianly
finger raised in warning, he resumed the consultation: ‘No
Balbec before you are fifty!’ he called out to me, ‘and even
then it must depend on the state of the heart.’
My father spoke to him of it again, as often as we met him,
and tortured him with questions, but it was labour in vain:
like that scholarly swindler who devoted to the fabrication
of forged palimpsests a wealth of skill and knowledge and
industry the hundredth part of which would have sufficed
to establish him in a more lucrative—but an honourable oc-

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