“Their giant wings from walking hinder them”

Mme de Cambremer’s line, “Their giant wings from walking hinder them,” turns a flock of gulls rising above the sea into an allusion to the albatross. The quotation gives the birds a literary grandeur, but Mme de Cambremer has confused one species with another: its charm lies in the tension between poetic recognition and inaccurate observation.

The quotation and its occasion

When the gulls rise together toward the sun, Albertine points out their sudden flight. Mme de Cambremer responds with the line about giant wings hindering their walk. The words belong to a familiar poetic image of the albatross, not the gulls in front of the group, so the moment joins an actual spectacle to a literary association that does not quite fit it.

Albertine’s response to the birds

Albertine says that she loves gulls and recalls seeing them in Amsterdam. She associates them with the sea, imagining their salt-air presence reaching even through the city’s paving stones. Her recollection grounds the exchange in personal experience and sensory association, whereas Mme de Cambremer’s response frames the birds through verse.

Poetry, perception, and misrecognition

The brief exchange does not resolve into a choice between observation and imagination: the gulls are plainly flying, while the quotation lends their wings a different, literary significance. Yet the mistaken identification matters. The image illuminates the spectacle by making the birds seem burdened by the very wings that lift them, even as its mismatch exposes how readily a remembered phrase can displace the object it is meant to describe. The line’s effect depends on both movements at once: poetic enlargement and factual misrecognition.