Felix Lanzberg's Expiation by Ossip Schubin

Is Marienbad cheaper than Franzensbad because it is not so select, or is it less select because it is cheaper? I do not know. But certain it is that Marienbad does not possess the same stamp of distinction as Franzensbad, which latter, together with all the guests, seems about to slowly perish of its excessive distinction. The guests at Marienbad also lack that transparent thinness of the Franzensbad invalids, which so claims sympathy: they all look "not ill but only too healthy."

As the Marienbad invalids do not look like invalids, so Marienbad does not look like a water cure. It wholly lacks that fairylike appearance of a cure where invalidism is an elegant pastime. It is so severely commonplace, so ordinary that one is forced to believe in its reality. Fortunately there is some compensation in the country round about, and when the guests look from the windows of the miserable hotel rooms, beyond the plainness of the dusty streets to the green beautiful woods, the most pretentious are satisfied. The Marienbad woods are so charming, not those barbaric gloomy woods like the Bohemian forests for example, which with their black branches grumblingly bar the way to the sunbeams, and groan so continually that the song birds from pure terror have all died or gone away.