o the houses
in any other town in Italy, since I could imagine it only by the aid
of that heavy syllable of the name of Parma, in which no breath of air
stirred, and of all that I had made it assume of Stendhalian sweetness
and the reflected hue of violets. And when I thought of Florence, it was
of a town miraculously embalmed, and flower-like, since it was called
the City of the Lilies, and its Cathedral, Our Lady of the Flower. As
for Balbec, it was one of those names in which, as on an old piece of
Norman pottery that still keeps the colour of the earth from which
it was fashioned, one sees depicted still the representation of some
long-abolished custom, of some feudal right, of the former condition of
some place, of an obsolete way of pronouncing the language, which had
shaped and wedded its incongruous syllables and which I never doubted
that I should find spoken there at once, even by the inn-keeper who
would pour me out coffee and milk on my arrival, taking me down to watch
the turbulent sea, unchained, before the church; to whom I lent the
aspect, disputatious, solemn and mediaeval, of some character in one of
the old romances.

Had my health definitely improved, had my parents allowed me, if not
actually to go down to stay at Balbec, at least to take, just once, so
as to become acquainted with the architecture and landscapes of Normandy
or of Brittany, that one twenty-two train into which I had so often
clambered in imagination, I should have preferred to stop, and to alight
from it, at the most beautiful of its towns; but in vain might I
compare and contrast them; how was one to choose, any more than between
individual people, who are not interchangeable, between Bayeux, so lofty
in its noble coronet of rusty lace, whose highest point caught the light
of the old gold of its second syllable; Vitre, whose acute accent barred
its ancient glass with wooden lozenges; gentle Lamballe, whose whiteness
ranged from egg-shell yellow to a pearly grey; Coutances, a Norman
Cathedral, which its final consonants, rich and yellowing, crowned with
a tower of butter; Lannion with the rumble and buzz, in the silence of
its village street, of the fly on the wheel of the coach; Questambert,
Pontorson, ridiculously silly and simple, white feathers and yellow
beaks strewn along the road to those well-watered and poetic spots;
Benodet, a name scarcely moored that seemed to be striving to draw the
river down into the tangle of its sea