Down
there, close to Balbec, among all those places which are still so
uncivilised, 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 flower-beds 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, sulphurous 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.
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