Proust is a Beach Read
On the fictional Balbec, the real Cabourg, and romanticizing the beach.
Cabourg is a beach town in northern France known for its medieval history and for inspiring the fictional vacation hotspot, Balbec, in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. There wasn’t a whole lot happening there until the late 1800s. By then, other towns along the coast had become tourist destinations. And so it wasn’t long before a business man saw that sleepy fishing village and decided to turn it into something else. One hotel brought many others, and Cabourg was transformed. This may be the story of every beach town everywhere.
When I was in college, my parents sold their business and house in my rural Ohio hometown and moved to a beach town in South Carolina. So moving back home after graduation meant going somewhere totally different from the places I’d lived before, which were a farm towns and a college town. And they are very different. Beach towns revolve around tourism. For the tourists, it means a designed experience. And for the people who live there, it means catering to the out-of-towners. I lived in that beach town for a few years, and now live in a beach-adjacent town. All this is to say that I speak from some experience when I say: something happens to people at the beach, something in the brain, perhaps because of the mix of sun and salt. It’s happened to me, and I’ve seen it happen to other people.
Like any vacation, real life is suspended on a trip to the beach. The constant rhythm of the waves seems to lull you into a relaxed, receptive state. You see different sorts of people. You experience a temporary, different sort of life. And you are on the edge of a vast wild. The beach is easy to romanticize. Being away from home, away from the everyday, one gets a sense that anything can happen. That some indulgence is warranted. That, perhaps, finding love on vacation means that carefree, relaxed feeling can be taken home forever.
Proust introduces Balbec in the first volume of In Search of Lost Time. The place looms in the protagonist’s mind throughout the seven parts, both before we see him go there and long after he’s gone. Just before his first trip to Balbec with his grandmother, a family friend, quite romantically, compares the sunsets there to a flower garden:
“Down there, close to Balbec, among all those places which are still so uncivilized, there is a little bay, charmingly quiet, where the sunsets of the Auge Valley, those red-and-gold sunsets (which, all the same, I am very far from despising) seem commonplace and insignificant; for in that moist and gentle atmosphere these heavenly flowerbeds will break into blossom, in a few moments, in the evenings, incomparably lovely, and often lasting for hours before they fade. Others shed their leaves at once, and then it is more beautiful still to see the sky strewn with the scattering of their innumerable petals, sulfurous yellow and rosy red. In that bay, which they call the Opal Bay, the golden sands appear more charming still from being fastened, like fair Andromeda, to those terrible rocks of the surrounding coast, to that funereal shore, famed for the number of its wrecks, where every winter many a brave vessel falls a victim to the perils of the sea. Balbec! The oldest bone in the geological skeleton that underlies our soil, the true armor, the sea, the land’s end, the accursed region which Anatole France—an enchanter whose works our young friend ought to read—has so well depicted, beneath its eternal fogs, as though it were indeed the land of the Cimmerians in the Odyssey. Balbec; yes, they are building hotels there now, superimposing them upon its ancient and charming soil, which they are powerless to alter; how delightful it is, down there, to be able to step out at once into regions so primitive and so entrancing.”
The family friend, who is speaking to the protagonist’s father, goes on to further romanticize the place, giving it delicate, human qualities:
“Perhaps it is a castle which you encounter upon the cliff’s edge; standing there by the roadside, where it has halted to contemplate its sorrows before an evening sky, still rosy, through which a golden moon is climbing; while the fishing boats, homeward bound, creasing the watered silk of the Channel, moist its pennant at their mastheads and carry its colors. Or perhaps it is a simple dwelling house that stands alone, ugly, anything, timid-seeming but full of romance, hiding from every eye some imperishable secret of happiness and disenchantment.”
But then, in the same breath, he warns that such a place could have a detrimental effect on such an impressionable, dramatic young man like the protagonist:
“‘That land which knows not truth,’ he continued with Machiavellian subtlety, ‘that land of infinite fiction makes bad reading for any boy; and it is certainly not what I should choose or recommend for my young friend here, who is already so much inclined to melancholy, for a heart already predisposed to receive its impressions. Climates that breath amorous secrets and futile regrets may agree with an old an disillusioned man like myself, but they must always prove fatal to a temperament which is still unformed. Believe me,' he went on with emphasis, ‘the waters of that bay—more Breton than Norman—may exert a sedative influence, though even that is of questionable value, upon a heart which, like mine, is no longer unbroken, a heart for whose wounds there is no longer anything to compensate. But at your age, my boy, those waters are contraindicated.’”
This description and warning foreshadow much of what will unfold in the rest of Proust’s story. He goes to the beach. He meets a girl and falls in love. It consumes him! And, sadly, it doesn’t end well. The passage also speaks to that thing that happens in one’s brain while in that sort of a place, which writers of beach reads have been exploiting forever.
When it comes to beach reads, my only criteria is that it’s any book you happen to read at the beach. But Proust’s classic definitely takes you to the beach no matter where you read it.
And! I’ve written another book! A historical romance novel in which the characters go to the beach and, of course, fall in love.
Because these books are my little love song to French literature, I knew when I started planning the series that I wanted to get some characters to Cabourg. And the fact that Cabourg was developing at the time is what ultimately brings the characters in my new novel, The Opposite of Romantic, to the beach.
Here’s the blurb:
Is he something she can get out of her system? Or is he going to destroy everything she thought she knew about life... and herself?
Fiercely independent Vanessa Marnet is determined to advance her career as the first woman reporter at L'Entreprise newspaper. Orphaned as a teenager, she's relied largely on her own determination to rise from a secretarial position to the culture section's star writer. Just when the next step up seems to be within reach, a competitor purchases the paper and begins a hasty and messy merger of the two publications, throwing everything Vanessa has worked for into jeopardy.
To make matters worse, her new coworker is the object of her greatest professional rivalry. Benoit Levin is handsome and infuriating, and he's her direct competitor in what's becoming a hostile workplace. Vanessa goes to great personal lengths to shine next to Benoit. But instead of beating him, they're forced to team up on a reporting trip to a popular summer getaway on the northern coast.
Thrown together, they experience a series of very unromantic travel mishaps. And slowly Benoit begins to loosen Vanessa's uptight professionalism. Soon, competitive tension changes into something humiliatingly close to romance. But before true love can win Vanessa over, she has to learn that sometimes depending on others actually makes a person stronger.
After much ado, the book is done. The cover is almost done. And I’m trying to narrow down a release date. The thing about independent publishing is that I can fling books into the world as fast as I can write them. I’m not a super fast writer, but I guess because I have been a ghostwriter for so long, I can write books with some efficiency. Writing my own books is different, writing fiction is different, but the actual work is similar. Anyway, this third book in the series is getting a quick launch so that it will hopefully be available before beach read season passes us by.
I’m not sure exactly what’s going to happen between now and then, but one thing I really want to do as part of this book’s launch is publish some short fiction on Substack, which subscribers will receive by email. This means, if all goes well, I will be in touch more this summer, giving you things to read. I hope you don’t mind; but if you do, I will include instructions for choosing whether or not you want the short stories in addition to the regular monthly letter. Look for the first one—a beach read!—in the next few weeks.
Thank you for reading!
Melinda
You’re reading Melinda’s Letter, a monthly email about books, culture, and life from essayist and historical romance author, Melinda Copp. I’m also on Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky.
Life is a beach, as some have said!