Proust's Balbec

Balbec, the fictional seaside resort in Normandy, was inspired largely by Cabourg, which is a real city in northern France, and its waterfront Grand-Hôtel. This seaside resort on the Normandy coast is the model for the hotel in the novel that Proust locates in the fictional coastal town of Balbec. During his long vacations at the hotel, Proust wrote many of the passages for his book. The building, its dining room, and the esplanade (now the Promenade Marcel Proust) that runs in front of the hotel along the beach are the models for the Grand-Hôtel at Balbec in the novel. Proust’s stays at the hotel ended due to the outbreak of World War I, during which time the hotel served as a hospital for wounded soldiers. The Grand-Hôtel remains virtually unchanged from Proust’s era and continues to operate as a luxury hotel. Proust’s room, no. 414, was recreated with period furnishing and décor.

There is a scene in Within a Budding Grove where the narrator describes the differing views looking out on the sea from his room at the Grand-Hôtel. He describes a particular view as a “premeditation or specialty of the artist’s, to present a ‘Cloud Study.’” In another, Proust makes an allusion to Whistler’s Crepuscule in Opal.

Le Grand Hôtel de Cabourg

The Grand-Hôtel of Cabourg, that opened in 1907, is one of many luxory hotels that were built around 1900 to meet the needs of increasing numbers of well-to-do tourists. It is, however, one of the few that has been preserved and that still functions as a hotel. Proust spent every summer here from 1907 to 1914. The hotel is clearly one of the chief models for the Grand Hôtel at Balbec.

Proust's Room, no. 414

"A few weeks later, when I went upstairs, the sun had already set. Like the one that I used to see at Combray, behind the Calvary, 280 when I came home from a walk and was getting ready to go down to the kitchen before dinner, a band of red sky above the sea, compact and clear-cut as a layer of aspic over meat, then, a little later, over a sea already cold and blue like the fish called mullet, a sky of the same pink as the salmon that we would presently be ordering at Rivebelle reawakened the pleasure that I was to derive from dressing to go out to dinner. Over the sea, quite near the shore, were trying to rise, one beyond another, at wider and wider intervals, vapors as black as soot but also with the polish and consistency of agate, of a visible weight, so much so that the highest of them, poised at the end of their contorted stem and overreaching the center of gravity of those that had hitherto supported them, seemed on the point of bringing down in ruin this lofty structure already half the height of the sky, and precipitating it into the sea. The sight of a ship that was moving away like a nocturnal traveler gave me the same impression that I had had in the train of being set free from the necessity of sleep and from confinement in a bedroom. Not that I felt myself a prisoner in the room in which I now was, since in an hour I was going to leave it and get into a carriage. I threw myself down on the bed; and, just as if I had been lying in a berth on board one of those steamers that I could see quite near to me and which at night it would be strange to see sailing slowly out into the darkness, like shadowy and silent but unsleeping swans, I was on all sides surrounded by images of the sea."

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, 417

Promenade Marcel Proust

This esplanade, presumably the inspiration for the one at Balbec, runs along the seashore at Cabourg. A visitor can step from the hotel lobby onto the promenade, just as does the Narrator in the novel. Due to Proust's fame, the esplanade was named in his honor.

Le Casino de Cabourg

This casino, like the one in the novel at Balbec, is an annex of the Grand Hôtel. In the novel, Proust sets a number of scenes in the casino.

L'Église Notre Dame de Dives-sur-Mer

This church was constructed and modified over the centuries but began as a Romanesque building funded by gifts from William the Conqueror. A panel on its wall listed all those who sailed with him in 1066 to conquer England. Proust took the church and part of its history as a model for the church at Balbec. A famous miracle associated with the church and port is described in In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower:

It was, most certainly, in the sea that the fishermen had found, according to the legend, the miraculous Christ, of which a stained-glass window, in the church that stood a few yards from where I now was, recorded the discovery.

This Christ was no doubt inspired by a statue of Christ that fishermen from Dives-sur-Mer caught in their nets in April 1001. On the first haul, they pulled in the Christ figure without the cross, then the cross itself. This catch attracted a large number of pilgrims to Dives-sur-Mer until 1562, when the statue was burned by Protestants. The small village is only about a mile from Cabourg.

The Church of Criquebeouf at Carqueville

The Church of Saint-Martin, built in the Romanesque style, dates from the twelfth century and is known as the "ivy chapel." We find this description of its façade in In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower:

Mme de Villeparisis, seeing that I liked churches, promised me that we would visit now one and then another, and especially the one at Carqueville, 'quite buried in all its old ivy,' as she said with a wave of the hand which seemed tastefully to envelop the absent façade in an invisible and delicate screen of foliage.

And in a letter to a friend vacationing in Normandy, Proust recalls his own visit:

If you go and see the dear little church of Criqueboeuf nestling under its ivy, give it an affectionate greeting from me.

Cathedral de Lisieux

The Gothic Cathedral of Lisieux was completed in 1230. In an article, Impressions de route en automobile, that Proust wrote for Le Figaro, he described his 1907 visit to Lisieux where he arrived after nightfall and despaired of being to see the edifice described by Ruskin. Suddenly, the statues on the façade "leaped out of the darkness as the 'ingenious' Agostinelli trained the headlights on the portals. Alfred Agostinelli was Proust's chauffeur and later secretary.

L'Auberge Guillaume le Conquérant

This place, named for Guillaume-le-Conquérant (William the Conqueror) who sailed from the nearby port of Dives to conquer England, is an ancient hotel-restaurant that Proust frequented.