Carlsbad is a spa destination associated with Adèle’s recurring summer holidays and with Stefania’s role as her constant companion and attendant. Remembered alongside other resorts and journeys, it represents both the restorative promise of travel and the care work that made such travel possible for Adèle.

A Recurrent Holiday Destination

While her father was alive, Adèle went to Carlsbad almost every year, as did many of the respectable residents of Stanislaviv. In other years, the pair travelled to Dora or Yaremche. Stefania accompanied Adèle on these trips, making the resort part of a larger pattern of shared movement rather than a destination Adèle visited alone.

The holidays were also tied to Adèle’s changing circumstances. After her father’s death, the established pattern of travel became less dependable. When Adèle missed a summer away, her return from the vacation season brought a severe melancholy: she felt that her life lay behind her, futile and finished. Stefania blamed herself, believing that her insistence on keeping Felix at their home had prevented Adèle from taking the restorative holiday she needed.

Travel and Caregiving

For Stefania, accompanying Adèle meant more than sharing the journey. She recalls that the trips were presented as a way to restore her own color, since her complexion had become waxen, but adds that someone still had to empty the chamber pots. The practical detail punctures the genteel image of a holiday: Stefania’s movement alongside Adèle did not release her from domestic service.

This imbalance had already shaped their travels together. Stefania and Adèle had been inseparable since childhood, and Stefania even went with Adèle on her honeymoon through Krakow, Budapest, and Vienna. On that journey she secured soft-boiled eggs for Adèle and herself, searched each morning for fresh cream, and continued to dress and prepare Adèle. Carlsbad belongs to the same history of intimacy in which companionship and service were difficult to separate.

Significance in the Narrative

Carlsbad is recalled not through an account of its sights or treatments but through the relationships and routines organized around going there. Its significance lies in the contrast between the promise of recuperation and the labor Stefania carries with her: Adèle’s holidays offer rest and sunlight, while Stefania’s attendance remains necessary and largely invisible.

The destination also measures a loss. Adèle’s father had been alive during the years when these nearly annual visits formed part of her life; later, a missed season could sharpen her sense that vitality and possibility belonged to the past. In this way, Carlsbad serves as a remembered setting for both shared attachment and the fragile conditions under which that attachment was sustained.