lived,
the timid and unsuspected essay towards social intercourse which they
had attempted there, clustered upon a promontory of the shores of Hell,
at the foot of the cliffs of death; and gothic art seemed to me a more
living thing now that, detaching it from the towns in which, until then,
I had always imagined it, I could see how, in a particular instance,
upon a reef of savage rocks, it had taken root and grown until it
flowered in a tapering spire. I was taken to see reproductions of the
most famous of the statues at Balbec,--shaggy, blunt-faced Apostles,
the Virgin from the porch,--and I could scarcely breathe for joy at the
thought that I might myself, one day, see them take a solid form against
their eternal background of salt fog. Thereafter, on dear, tempestuous
February nights, the wind--breathing into my heart, which it shook no
less violently than the chimney of my bedroom, the project of a visit to
Balbec--blended in me the desire for gothic architecture with that for a
storm upon the sea.

I should have liked to take, the very next day, the good, the generous
train at one twenty-two, of which never without a palpitating heart
could I read, in the railway company's bills or in advertisements of
circular tours, the hour of departure: it seemed to me to cut, at
a precise point in every afternoon, a most fascinating groove, a
mysterious mark, from which the diverted hours still led one on, of
course, towards evening, towards to-morrow morning, but to an evening
and morning which one would behold, not in Paris but in one of those
towns through which the train passed and among which it allowed one
to choose; for it stopped at Bayeux, at Coutances, at Vitre, at
Questambert, at Pontorson, at Balbec, at Lannion, at Lamballe, at
Benodet, at Pont-Aven, at Quimperle, and progressed magnificently
surcharged with names which it offered me, so that, among them all, I
did not know which to choose, so impossible was it to sacrifice any.
But even without waiting for the train next day, I could, by rising and
dressing myself with all speed, leave Paris that very evening, should
my parents permit, and arrive at Balbec as dawn spread westward over the
raging sea, from whose driven foam I would seek shelter in that church
in the Persian manner. But at the approach of the Easter holidays, when
my parents bad promised to let me spend them, for once, in the North
of Italy, lo! in place of those dreams of tempests, by which I had