On the other hand, the spectacle of Balbec seemed to me none the less desirable because I must purchase it at the price of a discomfort which, on the contrary, I felt to indicate and to guarantee the reality of the impression which I was going there to seek, an impression the place of which no spectacle of professedly equal value, no "panorama" which I might have gone to see without being thereby precluded from returning home to sleep in my own bed, could possibly have filled.