TIME BEGINS TO BE LOSTnight-journey with his grandmother to Balbec. At eleven in the
morning he arrived at Avallon and took a carriage to Vezelay-
'a prodigious place in the middle of a kind of Switzerland,
solitary on the top of a mountain which dominates the surround-
ing hills, visible for miles around in a landscape of the most
extraordinary harmony; the church is enormous, more like a
Turkish bath than Notre-Dame, built in alternating black and
white stone, a delicious Christian mosque'. Here at Vezelay, with
its union of Norman gothic and almost oriental romanesque,
there is something of the 'Persian' church of Balbec. He returned
to Avallon for the night, but could not sleep for fever. He walked
the streets until it was time for the six a.m. train to Dijon, where
he saw in the Hotel de Ville, once the palace of the Dukes of
Burgundy and now the Museum, the polychrome tombs of John
the Fearless and Philip the Bold: he already knew the casts of
these monuments at the Trocadero, but 'you can't get any idea
of them from the models, because the real thing is painted in so
many colours'. Although he had now spent two days and nights
without sleep, he continued 'my journey into death; at the
stations people asked if they could get me anything, and when I
saw my face in a mirror I didn't recognise it'. At dinner-time
Maurice DUElay saw his spectral figure tottering from the hotel
omnibus at Evian, amid the lightly-clad holiday makers, muffled
in his fur-lined winter overcoat.
After a few days in bed Proust was so fully restored that, as he
wrote with pride to Lauris and Robert de Billy, 'I'm up every
day by two in the afternoon!' He was anxious for Lauris, who
was in love with a married woman, and for Fenelon, now back
in Constantinople, to whom the Bulgarian rebellion then raging
in Macedonia was dangerously near. Mme de Noailles had already
left Amphion; but he joined Albufera and Louisa de Momand at
Chamonix for a day's excursion on mule-back to Montanvert,
where 'the agile Louisa displayed all her graces on the Mer de
Glace'. He thought of the plan he had been discussing with his
friends, to form a lay monastery for reading, writing and medita-
tion: an echo of his dream ten years before, in the summer of
Willie Heath, of 'living in a chosen circle of noble-minded men
and women, far from the arrows of stupidity, vice and malice'.
'If only you could be the admirable abbess, habited all in white I'
he wrote to Mme de Noailles; and to Lauris: 'don't tell a soul,