all the feelings that she aroused in me, seemed to me the most opposite
thing in the world to the mechanical inventions of mankind The less she
bore their imprint, the more room she offered for the expansion of my
heart. And, as it happened, I had preserved the name of Balbec, which
Legrandin had cited to us, as that of a sea-side place in the very midst
of "that funereal coast, famed for the number of its wrecks, swathed,
for six months in the year, in a shroud of fog and flying foam from the
waves.

"You feel, there, below your feet still," he had told me, "far more even
than at Finistere (and even though hotels are now being superimposed
upon it, without power, however, to modify that oldest bone in the
earth's skeleton) you feel there that you are actually at the land's
end of France, of Europe, of the Old World. And it is the ultimate
encampment of the fishermen, precisely like the fishermen who have
lived since the world's beginning, facing the everlasting kingdom of
the sea-fogs and shadows of the night." One day when, at Combray, I had
spoken of this coast, this Balbec, before M. Swann, hoping to learn from
him whether it was the best point to select for seeing the most violent
storms, he had replied: "I should think I did know Balbec! The church
at Balbec, built in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and still
half romanesque, is perhaps the most curious example to be found of our
Norman gothic, and so exceptional that one is tempted to describe it
as Persian in its inspiration." And that region, which, until then, had
seemed to me to be nothing else than a part of immemorial nature, that
had remained contemporaneous with the great phenomena of geology--and as
remote from human history as the Ocean itself, or the Great Bear, with
its wild race of fishermen for whom, no more than for their whales,
had there been any Middle Ages--it had been a great joy to me to see
it suddenly take its place in the order of the centuries, with a stored
consciousness of the romanesque epoch, and to know that the gothic
trefoil had come to diversify those wild rocks also, at the appointed
hour, like those frail but hardy plants which, in the Polar regions,
when the spring returns, scatter their stars about the eternal snows.
And if gothic art brought to those places and people a classification
which, otherwise, they lacked, they too conferred one upon it in return.
I tried to form a picture in my mind of how those fishermen had