)26 MARCEL PROUST
himself choking with asthma and shivering with a high fever.
He negotiated busily to prevent a duel between Jacques Bizet and
a friend of Antoine and Bertrand, the playwright Andre Picard,
but only at the expense of consenting to be Picard's second, which
put him in the bad books of Bizet and the Straus's. Then, on 8
August, after a last supper with the departing and convalescent
diplomat, he and Antoine put Bertrand into his train, 'looking as
frisky as could be'. Antoine himselfleft a few days later for a post
at the Roumanian Embassy in London, after a new quarrel which
they had no time to make up. Proust had recently received his
proofs from the Mercure de France, made a number of corrections
suggested by Marie Nordlinger, and mislaid the whole batch: 'my
publisher is annoyed,' he told her, 'and 1 am not sure whether he
will want to publish the work of so un-business-Iike and boring
a translator'. For a time he still hesitated where to go for his
holiday. Should he join Lauris in Brittany, and see once more the
Pointe du Raz?-'historically, geographically and literally, you
know, it's Finisterre, the end of the world, a giant granite cliff
round which the sea rages eternally, towering over the Bay of
Ghosts, a place of funereal and illustrious malediction!' Or might
he visit MIle N ordlinger in the other half of Balbec, at Varange-
ville near Dieppe, 'by the exquisite little graveyard, whose quiet-
ness is a prelude to the unending silence enjoyed by its dead,
which our living ears cannot detect, for they are distracted by
this merely relative silence, deepened though it may be by the
regular and repeated advance of the wa\.«s far below'? Suddenly,
in the small hours of a morning in early September, after a fare-
well dinner with Lauris, Albufera and Louisa de Mornand, he set
out by a strangely devious route for Evian.
Feverish, asthmatic and exalted by his solitary journey, he was
unable to sleep in the train as it ran in the moonlight past Melun,
the Forest of Fontainebleau and Sens. Along the valley of the. Y onne towards Auxerre the line threaded between steep, vine-
clad hills and little towns, those to the east still silvery-black in
the moonlight, those to the west already rose-pink in the rising
sun. 'I was seized with a mad desire to ravish little sleeping
towns-you notice 1 say villes, notfilles, towns, not little sleeping
girls,' he wrote to Lauris, using the sexual imagery which he so
often associated with travel. He transferred this magical ride
through hills lit simultaneously by moon and SUn to the Narrator's