Page 594 - swanns-way

nature, by all the feelings that she aroused in me, seemed to
me the most opposite thing in the world to the mechanical
inventions of mankind The less she bore their imprint, the
more room she offered for the expansion of my heart. And,
as it happened, I had preserved the name of Balbec, which
Legrandin had cited to us, as that of a sea-side place in the
very midst of ‘that funereal coast, famed for the number of
its wrecks, swathed, for six months in the year, in a shroud
of fog and flying foam from the waves.
‘You feel, there, below your feet still,’ he had told me, ‘far
more even than at Finistère (and even though hotels are
now being superimposed upon it, without power, however,
to modify that oldest bone in the earth’s skeleton) you feel
there that you are actually at the land’s end of France, of Eu-
rope, of the Old World. And it is the ultimate encampment
of the fishermen, precisely like the fishermen who have lived
since the world’s beginning, facing the everlasting kingdom
of the sea-fogs and shadows of the night.’ One day when, at
Combray, I had spoken of this coast, this Balbec, before M.
Swann, hoping to learn from him whether it was the best
point to select for seeing the most violent storms, he had
replied: ‘I should think I did know Balbec! The church at
Balbec, built in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and
still half romanesque, is perhaps the most curious exam-
ple to be found of our Norman gothic, and so exceptional
that one is tempted to describe it as Persian in its inspira-
tion.’ And that region, which, until then, had seemed to me
to be nothing else than a part of immemorial nature, that
had remained contemporaneous with the great phenome-

594 Swann’s Way