MArcel Proust is inevitable in Cabourg. He is the great man of the pretty Normandy seaside resort, where he spent eight successive summers, until the outbreak of the First World War. All of Cabourg (Balbec, in The research) is proud of the traces of this perceptible past during walks in the fan-shaped avenues punctuated by Belle Epoque villas. The nerve center of the city is this Grand Hotel as the writer knew it, majestic, imposing. The building is as if set on the crest of ancient dunes, on the very edge of the sea. As soon as you pass through its revolving doors, you have the impression of diving into the sometimes turquoise, sometimes beige water of the English Channel. “Having learned that there was a hotel in Cabourg, the most comfortable on the whole coast, I went there. Since I’ve been here, I can get up and go out every day, which hasn’t happened to me for six years”wrote Proust to the Comtesse de Caraman-Chimay, in the summer of 1907.
The iodized air, devoid of pollen, is favorable to his asthma. We enter the vast hall of the palace (today a five-star MGallery) and almost nothing has changed, we are assured. On the right, the grand staircase leading to the rooms occupied by the author, preferably on the top floor, so as not to hear footsteps above him. An observer of local society, he wrote a large part of his work here. He didn’t bathe. He worked a lot, without renouncing outings on the dyke (today the Marcel-Proust promenade) or walks in the surrounding countryside (the driver of the Grand Hotel, Alfred Agostinelli, is said to have inspired the character of Albertine, to whom the narrator devotes a passion in the novel).
There is still the impressive chandelier in the hall. And the restaurant with its large bay windows, which made one think, writes Proust, “to an immense and marvelous aquarium in front of the glass wall of which the working population of Balbec, the fishermen and also the families of the lower middle class, invisible in the shadows, crashed against the glazing to see, slowly swaying in eddies of however, the luxurious life of these people”. As for room 414, the writer could have slept there. Very often rented and a little more expensive than the others, it is distinguished by its metal bed and its Belle Epoque decor, its portrait of Proust and its library where (re)reading In the shade of young girls in flowers Or Sodom and Gomorrahvolumes of the novel in which Balbec appears most often.
To find the time of Proust
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