I was a hotel devoid of memory, but I am beginning to remember. They were all dressed in formal attire, and engaged in polite murmured conversations while standing about decorously, in the unobtrusive manner of well bred people. It was a place of relaxation, no business was discussed, no projects were undertaken, no one ever talked about anything that might arouse the passions. No one is vulgar. No one is concerned about vulgar matters like money. They have no need of it. Nobody hurries. Here are people who worked no more. Leisured people. The whole of existence for these guests is leisure, repetitive, endless leisure. Their whole time is conversation and games, charades, clay pigeon shooting, ballroom dancing, taking the air, poker.

In an opulent hotel with vast gardens, guests gossip languidly about a scandal. Last year in Marienbad the weather was impossibly cold, icy. They had an affair. Was it then? She cannot remember. He wants to convince her that last year, perhaps in Marienbad, they had met, become lovers, and even planned to leave together. The architecture of the hotel and its grounds seems lifeless, geometrical, synthetic. The park is a vast Versailles garden reassuringly arranged, with clipped bushes, and regular paths where we may walk with measured steps, side by side, day after day, within arm’s reach but without ever coming any closer to each other. A vast window opening on to the terrace from the gaming room affords us a view of the main avenue with its tiny figures moving from station to station as if choreographed. They seem like simulacra and not real people. The guests drifted like somnabulists from the court where the stage was, and mingled with the histrionic statues that lined the room. I imagine them as if they were captured on a still photograph, people, statues, palmate trees, silent, still. They stand statuesque, motionless with a vacant gaze among the emptily chatting guests and the theatrical decorations. Some have moved and now have adopted a different posture.

Inner experience. like emerging and disappearing memories, is subjective. We experience what is in our minds. Can we truly remember anything? I can never properly remember the bedroom, or what you were wearing. The scent. Was it rose geranium? The flowers. Were they Madonna lilies? The details do not matter. It is what happened. What I wanted to happen. I dream endlessly of moving slowly through the hallways, galleries, and salons of the hotel’s endless passages. I am walking on, again, down these corridors, through these halls, these galleries, in this sun-king splendour of a forgotten era, this enormous, florid, fustian, flamboyant hotel, where corridors succeed endless corridors, silent deserted corridors overloaded with an ageing, frigid opulence of woodwork, plasterwork, tracery, marble, smoked glasswork, blackened oil paintings, columns, heavy fabrics, ornamented architravings, series of arches, walkways, intersecting passages, that open in turn on dusty salons, floridly decorated atriums, deserted palm courts. Are they real or imagined, thinking or mindless? Can they remember? I cannot remember events perfectly, in a perfect sequence. Time seems jagged like a broken mirror. They leave and reappear. As if in a dream, they are in different places at the same time. I leave him by the grand staircase and enter the conservatory, and here he is again, smiling, challenging me…

Eurydice forever falls back into the underworld. She did not just fall once. Orpheus did not look back only once in all eternity. He does it continuously. Perpetually. Behind us, the silhouette of the castle grew menacingly larger against the dark night sky as we fled. The surrounds of this institution were a kind of park à la francaise without any trees or flowers, without any foliage. A conceptually simple design with no organic shapes, geometric, angular. Gravel, stone, marble and straight lines marked out rigid spaces, surfaces with little mystery by day. It seemed, at first glance, impossible to get lost here. Straight paths extend into the distance, between lines of fantastic statues with frozen gestures casting grotesque shadows from their granite slabs… on, along, across, down, intersection after intersection… you are lost. There had to be a way, a strategy to solve the endless losses… Already lost yet the shadow of the house still envelopes you, lost forever, in the calm icily cold night, alone with me… until next year… in Marienbad. This year you promised to elope with me, to leave him. Slowly I convinced you. The past is a stifling, lifeless place. It all seemed to me strange, even indeterminate. Did things happen quite like that? It sometimes seemed not to make sense. It seemed ambiguous and uncertain.