DESCENT INTO THE CITIES OF THE PLAIN 183similarly, in Jean Santeuil, Jean is recommended to visit Beg-Meil
by his mother's friends the Sauvalgues.
Their hotel was a converted farmhouse, and M. F ermont the
proprietor had the kindly bluffness of a farmer: soon Proust was
treated as one of the family, just as he had been in Mme
Renvoyze's lodgings at Orleans. They stayed in the annexe a
hundred yards from the main building, and pension was a mere
two francs a day. Apple orchards descended to the edge of the
sea, and the cider-like smell of rotting wind-falls mingled with the
scent of seaweed. Proust made friends with a fisher-boy, who took
him out into the bay at evening to hear the bells of Concarneau,
and carefully avoided the shoals of jelly-fish which Proust hated,
and kept a bottle of ink in his boat in case the young gentleman
should wish to write. A shout of "Good-night, good fishing,"
came from a passing smack, and "Good-night, good fishing,"
Proust would blissfully call back. In the afternoons after their
enormous lunch he lay hidden in the sand-dunes with Reynaldo,
reading Balzac, and Carlyle's Heroes and Hero-worship in Izoulet-
Loubatiere's translation. They found that the absence of indoor
sanitation was made still more serious by the prevalence of nettles.
Among the other guests at the hotel was a minor F ranco-
American marine painter, Alexander Harrison, whose Blue Lalce
they had already noticed in the Luxembourg Museum. 'He's
stayed here for nine months every year for the last seventeen
years,' wrote Reynaldo to his sister Maria. Half-serious, half-
joking, they sent him a joint letter announcing their intense
admiration for his work and begging to be allowed to meet him;
and after dinner the amused but flattered painter joined them at
their table. From this incident comes the meeting with the
novelist C. at 'Kerengrimen' in Jean Santeuil, though C. himself
is a memory of Maupassant in Normandy; and in A I'Ombre
Harrison for a moment becomes Elstir, to whom the Narrator and
Saint-l.oup introduce themselves in the same way in the
restaurant at Rivebelle. He recommended a trip to Penmarch-
"a sort of mixture of Holland, the East Indies and Florida,"l he
1 Similarly, when Elstir urges the Narrator to visit Carqucthuit near
Balbec in preference to the Pointe du Raz, he S:.1)'S of Carquethuit: "I don't
know anything quite an:.11ogous to it in the rest of France, it reminds one more
uf ('erwin aspt.'I.:TS of Fl, lri,\.I" (1, 854). Elsrir at HiveLellt: in the time when the
restaur~lHt is sdl! :l humble f'.lfln (1, 826) resembles Harrison at Bcg~Mt!il.