MARCEL PROUSTsaid, referring to its sand-dunes and sub-tropical climate, "and a
storm there is the sublimest thing you could see anywhere".
When a storm came they duly went, by pony-trap, to the nearest
station at Pont I' Abbe, and then on the little local railway to the
Pointe de Penmarch. They crawled on hands and knees through
the gale to the edge of the cliff; and below him Proust saw, instead
of the expected violence and turmoil, a white procession of calm
Alpine heights slowly surging and falling into the abyss, and
thundering as they fel!.
It was Beg-Meil that gave to Balbec-besides one syllable of
its name--the Celtic mystery of its position. The mystery resides
in the idea, and dissolves in the reality of Balbec, which is found
when the Narrator visits it to be a charming but ordinary
Normandy resort like Cabourg, Trouville or Dieppe. But when
Legrandin speaks of "Balbec, the most ancient bone in the geo-
logical skeleton of our soil, the end of the world, the real country
of the Cimmerians, that funereal shore famed for its numberless
shipwrecks, the eternal realm of the sea-mists," and the Narrator
as a child longs to take 'the beautiful, generous one-twenty-two
train' which will land him at Balbec after an all-night journey,
'when the grey dawn rises on a raging sea', and then proceed to the
Breton towns of Lanni on, Pont-Aven and Quimperle,l the yet un-
visited Balbec is united with Beg-Mei!' Brittany, also, was a land of
many 'little trains', of which Proust travelled on at least two, that
from Auray to Quiberon, whence he sailed to Belle-Isle, and that
from Pont l'Abbe to Penmarch, when he went to meet the gale.
His return to Paris in mid-October was soon followed by a
catastrophe. He had been absent from the Mazarine almost
continuously since July, and had made delightful plans for still
more leave; but now he heard that the third of the new attaches
was to be transferred to the Ministry of Public Instruction for
routine service in the registration of books deposited under the
law of copyright. He informed his superior at the Ministry of his
delicate state of health, and M. Franklin was invited to throw one
of the two senior attaches to the wolves in his place. 'Monsieur
Proust seemed to me to enjoy excellent health,' replied the in-
exorable Franklin, 'and ifhe has been concealing infirmities which
render him unfit for his very light duties, he has only to resign.'
Instead, Proust asked for further leave, invoking the all-powerful
1 I, lJO, 385-6