182 MARCEL PROUSTsister Maria in a flirtatious cadenza of marine epithets-'O my
sister Maria, confidant of my inmost thoughts' -she was reading
his Baldassare Silvande-'lighthouse of wandering woes, star of
kindness, halcyon of exiles, sea-breeze, song of mighty oarsmen,
shiver oflittle mossfronds, perfume of friendship, delicious fluting
of winds that bring lost ships to life .. .' and so on. 'Marcel is
rather tight-chested, his father may advise against Brittany,' wrote
Reynaldo to Maria on the 12th; and Mme Lemaire, with an in-
exorable hospitality worthy of Mme Verdurin at La Raspeliere,
reported on the 17th, 'Marcel is much better-if only they would
give up the Brittany idea-at least I make them eat regular meals,
which they wouldn't do at some dreadful little hotel.' But they
refused to give up this 'Brittany idea'; they returned to Paris on
30 August and left almost immediately for Belle-Isle. The railway
journey, like that of the first visit to Balbec, took all night; they
stayed in the Hotel de Bretagne at Palais, the chief port of the
island.
No doubt the visit to Brittany was, for Proust, like the arrival
at Balbec for the Narrator, the fulfilment of a childhood longingl:
he would see Renan's 'land of the virtuous Armoricans, who
dwell by a dark sea jagged with rocks, beaten by everlasting
storms', and perhaps, too, its 'girls with eyes like green wells, in
whose depths of undulating water-plants the blue sky is
mirrored'. But at first they were more conscious of making a
'pilgrimage to the habitations made glorious by Sarah Bernhardt',
as Proust wrote to Y turri; for Belle-Isle, an island ten miles from
the coast opposite Quiberon, was the summer residence of the
divine Sarah, and the home of the poetry-writing sailor whom she
had brought to the Delafosse fete. But when they had made the
customary excursions in a bumpy governess-cart, through the
purple heather and golden gorse of the slate uplands, and the
palm-trees of the warm valleys, and gazed on the Atlantic from
the hair-raising cliffs, there was nothing left to do: the season was
nearly over, and there was a dreadful smell of sardines. They fled
to the mainland on 6 September and settled at Beg-Meil, a fashion-
able little plage across the bay from Concarneau. Proust had
heard of the place from a friend of his parents, a banker and
music-lover named Andre Benac, who owned a chateau near by:
1 In point of fact, Proust had already visited Brittany as a child, and seen
Mont Sai:H-Michel ,,>-'lien he was tou little to apprcda:e it. (Cf. Billy, 115.)