MARGINAL COMMENT
NICOLSON
By HAROLD A S I read of the fierce achievement of the United States' armies in cutting the Cotentin peninsula I seem to hear the wealthy denizens of Park Avenue or Riverside Drive babbling about Cherbourg. For it was to that great harbour that these luxury ladies would come on their annual visits to Europe. The huge liners—the 'Normandie,' the Bremen,' or the 'Queen Mary '—would swing slowly past the long breakwater which guards the entrance between the Ile Pelee and the Fort Chavagnac. The great cabin trunks would rumble up the escalators ; the page boys and the lift boys in their cherry-coloured uniforms would dart about carrying little zip-fastened bags of alligator and morocco leather ; and finally the luxury ladies would themselves appear upon the gangway, their white hair beautifully set and curled, the orchids which they had been given in New York still fresh upon their bosoms, and in their gloved hands the last remaining box of candy or a long American novel with a book-mark marking chapter forty-two. Slow and elegant they would set foot upon the soil of Europe, and make their way through the customs shed to where the Paris special awaited them with the sunshine flashing upon the Evian bottles in the luncheon-car. Through Valognes and Montebourg-Etat the train would run, past Carentan and the Douve marshes, and so on via Bayeux through Caen and Lisieux to Paris. The blue limousines of the Ritz Hotel would meet them at the terminus and, drive them gently to the Place Vendome; and on entering their sitting-rooms they would raise the ivory receivers of the telephone and start making the appointments which would occupy their idle busy days. Today they will read of these great battles in the newspapers ; the names of Cherbourg, Carentan and • St. LS will echo on the wireless ; they will be astonished that some- thing so impersonal should have acquired a personal connection ; and they will feel that the heroic has entered somehow into their once indulgent lives.
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To the east of the bridgehead, or lodgement, there is another association which to the admirers of Marcel Proust will seem even more curious. Across the estuary of the Orne, seven kilometres only to the north of Troarn, is the watering place of Cabourg, the Grand Hotel of which figures prominently in the three volumes of A Pombre des 7eunes Files en Fleurs. Cabourg appears in the pages of Proust's novel under the name of Balbec Plage, and its large' hotel is described for us more minutely than any hotel in fiction. We know -the large entrance hall, with its heavy turkey carpet, and the Monegasque manager ("d'originalite roumaine") seated observantly at his desk ; we know the florid marble staircase which rises beyond ; we know that at the end of the corridor on each story there was a frosted window opening on the sunset towards Bayeux; we know the head waiter and the little lift boy who joined up in 1914. We know the door into the large dining- room where Madame de Villeparisis accosted Proust's grandmother ; we know the esplanade where Proust first met Albertine, Andree, Rosemonde and Gisele ; we know the 'Casino, at the door of which Proust encountered M. de Charlus and Saint Loup ; we know the bandstand and the shop where they sold ices ; we know the studio of Els& ; and we know the Château de Fiterne, where Madame de Cambremer lived after she had let Raspeliere to Madame Verdurin. How fascinated Proust would have been to realise that the hotel around which he had created his intricate and artificial world would one day stand at the very edge of a gigantic battle-field, and that the spider-web of nerves which he had woven around Balbec would be broken one day by the crudest emotions of anger, agony and feat.
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The little churches of Normandy which Proust loved so deeply, the ivy-coloured church at Carqueville, the three great trees at Hudimesnil, the church at Balbec itself to which he devoted such long and wearisome pages, have probably by now been blasted Out of existence. -The rich Normandy country, with its dour and sullen peasantry, has been scarred and ravaged. And in the Grand
Hotel itself, if it still exists, there must be German observation- posts and sand-bags at the end of each corridor facing westwards -across the estuary, and the echo of machine-gun fire through empty saloons. Even Proust himself can scarcely have imagined such an ending to the Grand Hotel at Cabourg. Yet in the second volume of Les 7eunes Fdles en Fleurs there is a curious passage which suggested that he did in fact have some intimation that his luxury world wotld not prove immortal. "When it became dark," he writes, "the electricity flung a flood of light upon the great dining- room, so that it took on the appearance of an immense and wonder- ful aquarium, against the glass partition of which the working-classes of Balbec, the fishermen and the families of the small shopkeepers, invisible in the shadows, would flatten their faces and would watch the luxurious lives of these people floating in a golden liquid, and seeming as strange to them as the lives of curious fish or molluscs." "It is," he adds, "a fascinating social problem to consider whether a partition of glass will for ever protect the festivals of these strange animals, or whether the dim people who stare greedily at them from the outside darkness will not one day come and catch them in their aquarium and eat them up alive." The great glass bowl has now been shattered ; the aquarium is destroyed ; and the only iridescence that remains to the carp, the molluscs and the mullets is the iridescence of death.
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I share Marcel Proust's fascinated interest, not unmixed with horror, at the mutability of human fortunes. It seems symbolic to me that the Normandie,' with its pink brocade sofas, its glisten- ing lifts, the huge incised glass panels of its dining-room, its elaborate state-rooms with their velvets and marqueterie, should have been submerged in the mud of New York harbour, and have been re- trieved only with its beauty disfigured by slime. It seems symbolic of me that the harbour at Cherbourg, once the gateway of expensive holidays, has become the prison of a German garrison. I am fascinated by the thought that Balbec, once the very focus of vivid if fictitious characters, should now be plunged into a reality more cruel than any that could have beeen conceived. And it is horrible to know that the lush fields of Normandy, those villages and churches so akin to our own in Kent or Sussex, should be scarred and levelled by the fierce engines of battle, and that their sumptuous simplicity should be marred perhaps for ever.
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The last time that I visited Cherbourg I did not arrive in a large liner ; I arrived in a very title yawl. It was the second week of August, 1939. They did not allow us to tie up in the Avant- Port, but obliged us to go through the lock-gates into the Basain de Commerce, which was heavy with the scent of herrings and the grime of coal. Cherbourg is an ugly town, and we were glad to leave it. Past Cap de la Hague we sailed next morning, past the summer-lit shape of Alderney, and' on to Guernsey on what we imagined was ,a journey to Brest. But mist descended upon us off Brittany and the surly, sullen bell-buoy off Ushant warned us that it would be wiser to turn back to Plymouth. We entered the Pool and tied up beside a little ketch called the Outward Bound.' There were two boys and a girl on board the ketch, washing their decks gaily and cleaning their brass-work while they sang aloud. I went down to the cabin and turned on the wireless. It told me that Ribbentrop had left for Moscow on an unspecified mission. As I came up again into the sunlight on deck the boys in the neighbour- ing ketch were still singing as they rubbed their brass-work. I changed into short clothes and walked sadly, carrying my bag, to the North Road Station. I knew that my sailing days were over, prob- ably for ever. I knew that we were on the eve of a Second German War. And as I sit here, almost five years later, listening to Hitler', meteor bomb roaring across the pleasant countryside of Southern England, it seems strange to me that Cherbourg, which for so long has in my mind been associated 'with the last week of peace, should now be becoming the symbol and the portent of the Iasi months of war.
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