In a letter to his friend Georges de Lauris, a young nobleman and later a novelist, Marcel Proust recounts a feverish journey across France.
September, 1903
Mon cher Georges,
Thank you with all my heart for the nice things you say to me. I shall answer them better by word of mouth. But why do you go back to “the beginnings of our friendship?” Do the succeeding ones seem to you less good? There were other things I didn’t understand. However you were probably prompted to say all that out of pure kindness of heart and to please me, without remembering anything about it yourself. Since you ask me for news of my health, here it is: after I left you, the restorative company of Albu did not succeed in lessening my fever, and I left in an indescribable state. I didn’t even think of sleeping on the train. I saw the sun rise, which hadn’t happened to me for a long time, and it was beautiful, a most charming reversal, I thought, of a sunset. In the morning I was taken with a mad desire to ravish the little sleeping cities (be sure that you read little sleeping villes and not little sleeping filles), those that lay to the west in a dying vestige of moonlight, those that lay to the east in the midst of the rising sun, but I controlled myself. I stayed on the train…Vézelay is prodigious, enclosed in a sort of Switzerland of its own on a mountain that dominates the others, visible for miles around in a most thrilling harmony of landscape. The Church is immense and looks as much like a Turkish bath as like Notre Dame; it is built in alternating black and white stones, a delightful Christian mosque. If I weren’t so tired (I have been sending post cards and this is the first letter I have written), I would tell you what one feels on entering it, a curious and beautiful experience. But that will be for the next time, because I am exhausted. In the evening I went back to Avallon and was taken with such a fever that I couldn’t even undress. I walked up and down all night. At five o’clock in the morning I found out that there was a train at six. I took it…And at eleven at night I arrived in Evian. But this frantic and sleepless journey, in spite of illness, this “journey towards death,” has changed me so much that I no longer recognized myself in the mirror; people in the railroad stations asked me whether there was anything they could do for me, and I understood the gentle wisdom of your advice (by which mother is still very much touched) not to leave home like this. Since then I have spent all my time trying to get well…You seem to be overwhelmed with attentions and I am happy about it. For the first time, in your letter, you again alluded to Madame X. I never mentioned her to you again as I didn’t know the state of your heart. You seem, from the happy and calm tone of your letter, to be undergoing the charms of convalescence or the uncertainties of a resuscitation. May it be blessed by all the forces of life and happiness that have already given you so much and which your friends so fervently wish for you.
Marcel Proust