Between Quimper and Balbec…

Between Quimper and Balbec… ✨🌦️

Marcel boards the train at Saint-Lazare station with his grandmother for his first visit to Balbec. On the train, he experiences a moment of wonder that is undoubtedly one of the most famous in the novel 🚂🌅:

🖋️ “Sunrises are a constant companion on long train journeys, just like hard-boiled eggs, illustrated newspapers, card games, rivers or boats that struggle on without making any headway. Just as I was counting the thoughts that had filled my mind in the preceding minutes, to work out whether or not I had been asleep (and whilst the very uncertainty that made me ask the question was itself providing me with an affirmative answer), in the windowpane, above a small patch of black woodland, I saw jagged clouds whose soft down was a fixed, dead pink that would never change, like the colour that dyes the feathers of the wing that has absorbed it, or the pastel onto which the painter’s imagination has laid it. But I sensed that, on the contrary, this colour was neither inertia nor whim, but necessity and life. Soon, reserves of light began to gather behind it. She brightened; the sky turned a crimson that I strove, pressing my eyes against the windowpane, to see more clearly, for I sensed it was connected to the very essence of nature; but as the railway line changed direction, the train turned, and the morning scene in the window’s frame was replaced by a village at night with roofs blue in the moonlight, featuring a washhouse encrusted with the opaline sheen of the night, beneath a sky still studded with all its stars, and I was dismayed to have lost my strip of pink sky when I spotted it again, but red this time, in the window opposite, which it abandoned at a second bend in the railway line; so that I spent my time running from one window to the other to bring them closer together, to piece together the intermittent and contrasting fragments of my beautiful, scarlet and changeable morning, and to have a complete view and a continuous picture.”

— Marcel Proust,
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, 1919 🌺
Pléiade 1954 (ed. Clarac and Ferré), pp. 654–655

#MarcelProust #Balbec #proustagram