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Updated: June 11, 2025
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.
"I have imbibed the shadows of fallen columns," he says in one of his tales, "at Balbec, and Tadmor, and Persepolis, until my very soul has become a ruin." Always beauty and grace are with him most poetic in their overthrow, and it is the shadow of ruined grandeur that he receives, instead of the still living light so fair upon them, or the green growth clinging around them.
Balbec est une bonne ville, bien fermée de murs, et assez marchande. Au centre étoit un château, fait de très-grosses pierres. Maintenant il renferme une mosquée dans laquelle est, dit-on, une tête humaine qui a des yeux si énormes, qu'un homme passeroit aisément la sienne
And yet nothing could have differed more utterly, either, from the real Balbec than that other Balbec of which I had often dreamed, on stormy days, when the wind was so strong that Francoise, as she took me to the Champs-Elysees, would warn me not to walk too near the side of the street, or I might have my head knocked off by a falling slate, and would recount to me, with many lamentations, the terrible disasters and shipwrecks that were reported in the newspaper.
Happily these Arabs were still more afraid of them, and were at once plundered by the escort, 'who laughed at our remonstrances against their injustice. Wood's Ruins of Balbec, p. 2. He wrote a Life of Watts, which Johnson quoted. Works, viii. 382. See ante, iii. 422, note 6. In the first two editions formal. Johnson maintains this in The Idler, No. 74.
If we laugh at the French, they stare at us. Our enormous luxury and expense astonishes them. I carried their Ambassador, and a Comte de Levi, the other morning to see the new winter Ranelagh [The Pantheon] in Oxford Road, which is almost finished. It amazed me myself. Imagine Balbec in all its glory! The pillars are of artificial giallo antico. The ceilings, even of the passages, are of the most beautiful stuccos in the best taste of grotesque. The ceilings of the ball-rooms and the panels painted like Raphael's loggias in the Vatican. A dome like the pantheon, glazed. It is to cost fifty thousand pounds. Monsieur de Guisnes said to me, "Ce n'est qu'
Its superiority over any thing at Rome, in Greece, at Balbec, or Palmyra, is allowed on all hands; and this single object has placed Nismes in the general tour of travellers. Having not yet had leisure to visit it, I could only judge of it from drawings, and from the relation of numbers who had been to see it.
Even in spring, to come in a book upon the name of Balbec sufficed to awaken in me the desire for storms at sea and for the Norman gothic; even on a stormy day the name of Florence or of Venice would awaken the desire for sunshine, for lilies, for the Palace of the Doges and for Santa Maria del Fiore.
I need only, to make them reappear, pronounce the names: Balbec, Venice, Florence, within whose syllables had gradually accumulated all the longing inspired in me by the places for which they stood.
"Where are the monuments that would prove the truth of so vague a theory?" "I know not what you call a monument." "The works of man! The glories of Thebes and Balbec columns, catacombs, and pyramids! standing amid the sands of the East, like wrecks on a rocky shore, to testify to the storms of ages!" "They are gone. Time has lasted too long for them. For why?
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