Page 593 - swanns-way

degree of harmony with the locality and surroundings of
the houses for which the rooms are planned.
And yet nothing could have differed more utterly, ei-
ther, from the real Balbec than that other Balbec of which
I had often dreamed, on stormy days, when the wind was
so strong that Françoise, as she took me to the Champs-
Elysées, would warn me not to walk too near the side of
the street, or I might have my head knocked off by a falling
slate, and would recount to me, with many lamentations,
the terrible disasters and shipwrecks that were reported in
the newspaper. I longed for nothing more than to behold a
storm at sea, less as a mighty spectacle than as a momentary
revelation of the true life of nature; or rather there were for
me no mighty spectacles save those which I knew to be not
artificially composed for my entertainment, but necessary
and unalterable,—the beauty of landscapes or of great works
of art. I was not curious, I did not thirst to know anything
save what I believed to be more genuine than myself, what
had for me the supreme merit of shewing me a fragment of
the mind of a great genius, or of the force or the grace of
nature as she appeared when left entirely to herself, without
human interference. Just as the lovely sound of her voice,
reproduced, all by itself, upon the phonograph, could never
console a man for the loss of his mother, so a mechanical
imitation of a storm would have left me as cold as did the
illuminated fountains at the Exhibition. I required also, if
the storm was to be absolutely genuine, that the shore from
which I watched it should be a natural shore, not an em-
bankment recently constructed by a municipality. Besides,

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