My addiction to literary pilgrimage is akin to masturbation

The hotel and its bright tan prayer rug of a beach were one. In the early morning the distant image of Cannes, the pink and cream of old fortifications, the purple Alp that bounded Italy, were cast across the water and lay quivering in the ripples and rings sent up by sea-plants through the clear shallows.

Recognise it? F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night. First page. Hollywood starlet Rosemary Hoyt and her mentoring mother take ground-floor rooms at a quiet beachside Antibes hotel. Rosemary wanders out and on to the aforementioned beach, takes off her bathing robe, wades into a ‘blue as laundry water’ sea, then ‘laid her face on the water and swam a choppy four-beat crawl out to the raft’. Returning ashore, she finds a space on the beach beside a party of rich and languid Americans, spreads out her peignoir on the sand, and lies down to sunbathe.