MARCEL PROUSTshe took them over the cliff tops in her motor-car to Honfleur,
through the landscapes he had roamed with Marie Finaly ten
years before. For once he enjoyed without asthma 'the mingled
scent ofleaves, milk and sea-salt'. And he remembered how every
Sunday Bertrand would say: "Do find me the Stock Exchange
column in Le Figaro, Marcel," and he would search in vain,
because on Sundays there was no such column.
Early in September he thought of visiting his parents at Evian
for the week-end-'I've been longing to see the beautiful lake
again' -but he could not bring himself to leave the pleasures and
miseries of Paris. The difficulty of persuading Marcel to take a
holiday that year was only solved when Fenelon consented to go
with him. After hastily reading up the Dutch and Flemish old
masters in Antoine's copy ofFromentin's Les Maitres d'autreflis,
and buying another to take with him, he left with Bertrand on
2 October for Bruges. He heard the carillon, which reminded him
of Mme Greffulhe's silvery laugh; and he met Harlette Comte,
who was to marry his friend Fernand Gregh in March 1903.
Soon he went on to Antwerp, where he was on the 9th, while
Fenelon went on ahead to Amsterdam to book rooms on the
Yeatmans' recommendation at the Hotel de l'Europe. Even
Proust found them fantastically expensive, though they had the
advantage of being heated by hot-water pipes, to which he
attributed his freedom from asthma during the whole visit; and
Fenelon himself took to dining out, rather than pay ten francs
for the tahle d' h&te dinner. Proust delighted once more in the
seagulls of Amsterdam, of which Albertine says to Mme de
Cambremer at Balbec: 'they smell the sea, they come to sniff
the salt air even through the paving-stones';1 and when he
returned from the day's excursion he saw, like Albertine, 'the
streets and towpaths brimming with a compact and joyful
crowd'.2 He visited Dordrecht on a showery day, and sent
Reynaldo a sketch of the ivy-covered church, 'reflected in a net-
work of sleeping canals, and in the tremulous, golden Meuse, in
whose water the boats at evening disturb the images of red roofs
and blue sky'. At Delft he saw 'an ingenuous little canal, be-
wildered by the din of seventeenth-century carillons and dazzled
by the pale sunlight; it ran between a double row of trees stripped
of their leaves by summer's end, and stroking with their branches
1 n, 814 • III,3 86