ooms, and in that which I found myself occupying had set
against the walls, on three sides of it, a series of low book-cases
with glass fronts, in which, according to where they stood, by a law
of nature which he had, perhaps, forgotten to take into account, was
reflected this or that section of the ever-changing view of the sea, so
that the walls were lined with a frieze of seascapes, interrupted only
by the polished mahogany of the actual shelves. And so effective was
this that the whole room had the appearance of one of those model
bedrooms which you see nowadays in Housing Exhibitions, decorated with
works of art which are calculated by their designer to refresh the eyes
of whoever may ultimately have to sleep in the rooms, the subjects being
kept in some degree of harmony with the locality and surroundings of the
houses for which the rooms are planned.

And yet nothing could have differed more utterly, either, from the real
Balbec than that other Balbec of which I had often dreamed, on stormy
days, when the wind was so strong that Francoise, as she took me to
the Champs-Elysees, would warn me not to walk too near the side of the
street, or I might have my head knocked off by a falling slate, and
would recount to me, with many lamentations, the terrible disasters and
shipwrecks that were reported in the newspaper. I longed for nothing
more than to behold a storm at sea, less as a mighty spectacle than as
a momentary revelation of the true life of nature; or rather there
were for me no mighty spectacles save those which I knew to be
not artificially composed for my entertainment, but necessary and
unalterable,--the beauty of landscapes or of great works of art. I was
not curious, I did not thirst to know anything save what I believed
to be more genuine than myself, what had for me the supreme merit of
shewing me a fragment of the mind of a great genius, or of the force
or the grace of nature as she appeared when left entirely to herself,
without human interference. Just as the lovely sound of her voice,
reproduced, all by itself, upon the phonograph, could never console a
man for the loss of his mother, so a mechanical imitation of a storm
would have left me as cold as did the illuminated fountains at the
Exhibition. I required also, if the storm was to be absolutely genuine,
that the shore from which I watched it should be a natural shore, not an
embankment recently constructed by a municipality. Besides, nature, by