Combray, Meseglise, Balbec.
Behind these invented names hide several very real places: Cabourg, Le Clos des Muriers, Trouville, and in Trouville, more precisely the Hôtel des Roches Noires, where Marcel Proust often stayed in his youth. These places mingle in his imagination to become those of Research… On the occasion of his birthday this Sunday, a small incursion into one of these places that have nourished his gaze.
Les Roches Noires is first and foremost a beautiful building in the Second Empire style, imposing, facing the sea, all of brick and stone. The dozens of large windows on its facade open onto the horizon, like so many looks. Built in 1866 at the time of the great luxury palaces in the seaside towns, the Roches Noires quickly became one of the most popular with the elegant of the Belle Époque.
Between 1880 and 1915, Marcel Proust enjoyed its delights and stayed there regularly, accompanied by his mother. You can see from the beach the three windows, at the left corner of the first floor of the hotel, which form the Proustian suite.
On the now empty terrace, one can imagine the one he describes in his novel, a restaurant that only a window separates from the sea and the sky. While strolling on the promenade, between the hotel and the waves, one would think to see the young Marcel himself, observing the elegant world, its games and its codes; we can look for the brushstrokes of Elstir, the painter of the Researchlooking at those still trying to capture the color-changing landscape…
In short, for a moment, enjoy the confusion between reality and fiction, inspired by the Proustian novel, and get lost in the limbo of our own memories, helped in this by the famous Vinteuil sonata, this sonata that Proust fantasized and which must have brought together all the melancholy of lost time. A certain Raoul Ruiz will finally have it composed by for his adaptation of Time regained …
The Belle Époque was followed by the Roaring Twenties… The hotel continued to live under the gaze of new artists, including the architect Robert Mallet-Stevens, who partly transformed it into an Art Deco manifesto, while preserving its Second Empire charm. The hotel lobby is the most striking example of this: a majestic and almost empty space, lined with huge bay windows that overlook the sea, the sunlight and the color of the waves rush into the transparency and seem become one with the pure and simple lines of this architecture…
In 1959, the hotel ceased its activity and its apartments were sold to individuals. Marguerite Duras, a great lover of the place and of Trouville, acquired in 1963 the apartment adjoining the one occupied by Proust, she spent all her summers there until her death.
As they were for Proust, the immutable charm of the hotel and the melancholy discretion of the seafront became sources of inspiration for the writer. She will choose this setting for several of her films. She will also write The Rapture of Lol V Stein a novel in the colors of this place…
There are few pleasures more immediate than that of reading on the beach of Roches Noires, facing the landscape that inspired her, Duras’ description of the sea – a sea that she nevertheless places in the United States… And it There are few emotions like the one that a walk along the Roches Noires brings, this meeting place between architectural thoughts and literary thoughts.