Proust's Cabourg is popular

By ADRIAN TAHOURDIN 

Nice coincidence, or a case of great minds thinking alike? In this week���s TLS our columnist J. C. gives a charming account of a recent visit to the Normandy seaside town of Cabourg, which was said to be the inspiration for Proust���s Balbec in his novel. The very next day I read a two-page spread in Le Monde on: the Grand H��tel in Cabourg . . . .

The article in Le Monde is the first in a twelve-part series on ���Hotels that changed the world��� (!) In common with its conservative rival Le Figaro, Le Monde finds imaginative ways to fill its summer pages (remember that France starts to shut down in late July and early August, so there is not a great deal of politics to report apart from the usual internecine battles in the Front National). The subsequent two articles, very different in tone, have been on the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which was bombed by Menachem Begin���s Stern Gang in 1946 with the loss of ninety-one lives, and the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, which the photographer Helmut Newton and his wife Alice Springs made their home for twenty-five years. Today���s article (which I haven���t read yet) covers the H��tel du Parc in Vichy, home to P��tain���s government between July 1940 and August 1944, while tomorrow���s will be on Nabokov���s hotel in Montreux ��� that should be interesting.

J. C. writes of how Proust would visit the hotel every summer from 1907 to 1914 ���for the sea air���. (He first visited Cabourg in 1890, with his grandmother, and again that year during his military service.) In the summer of 1914, meanwhile, Proust was one of the last guests to leave before the hotel was converted into a military hospital. Poor health prevented him from returning there after the war.

Rapha��lle R��rolle, the author of the Monde article, reveals that Proust spent 421 days in Cabourg (two months per year), which he would mostly spend in his usual room with sea view on the fourth floor of the Grand H��tel, booking out the two adjoining rooms for tranquillity. He stuck to the unusual hours he was in the custom of keeping elsewhere: rising late, not going out before mid-afternoon (to the Casino next door to the hotel), receiving young visitors in his room. And working late into the night. As the Proust scholar and biographer Jean-Yves Tadi�� wrote, ���it all began in the Grand H��tel���.

R��rolle reveals that the hotel (which has a mere seventy-one rooms, but retains its belle ��poque grandeur) is now popular with Parisians . . . and Japanese tourists. Room 414 (Proust���s room) is particularly sought after. Other rituals for Proustians include having a meal in the Balbec restaurant (which Proust would have done infrequently himself, subsisting on a diet of coffee and croissants), in the hotel. Proust called it the ���Aquarium��� in A l���Ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs. It���s now said to be very expensive.