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He does not travel to Italy, but whilst in Paris he plays in the Champs-Élysées with Gilberte, his dream of friendship born in the glimpse through the Tansonville hedge now fulfilled. Odette, now Swann’s wife and Gilberte’s mother, is much admired in the Champs-Élysées and the Bois de Boulogne, where the Narrator drags Françoise in order to catch a glimpse of Mme Swann’s elegance as she strolls among the trees.

The closing pages of Swann’s Way come to us from a much later chronological perspective. The Narrator speaks of leaving the ‘closed room’ he inhabits in Paris to go to Trianon via the Bois de Boulogne. Thus he brings into immediate proximity in the text two experiences of the same location at quite distinct periods of time – his early childhood and his adult life. The child, infatuated with the beauty and allure of his friend’s mother, saw the Bois as a sort of enchanted garden; now the adult’s sentiments and shift in pace introduce a tone reminiscent of Chet Baker’s gentle melancholy: the thrill is gone. Motorcars have replaced carriages, women are no longer elegant but ‘dreadful creatures’ who ‘hobble by beneath hats on which have been heaped the spoils of aviary or kitchen garden’ (SW, 511; 341). The experience of the madeleine might have been able to revive the memories of part of his past, but the Narrator’s painful realization in the final pages of Swann’s Way is that it is fruitless actively to seek in reality the images of the mind, since reality constantly evolves; if our memories have a powerful, positive sheen this is precisely because they are mental constructs and not realities in themselves.

Within a Budding Grove

In ‘Mme Swann at Home’, Part One of Within a Budding Grove, Odette takes centre stage. Time has passed. The erotic aspect of the Narrator’s relation with Gilberte matures. He frequents the Swann household, meeting the writer Bergotte, whose works in part introduced him to literature in Combray. The role of art develops in importance, held always in tension with social interaction and expectations: the Narrator makes his long-awaited trip to see the actress Berma perform but is overwhelmed and disappointed; and Bergotte’s appearance and persona seem out of keeping with his writings. Norpois, the diplomat, a colleague of the Narrator’s father, encourages the prospect of a literary career for the Narrator, but he repeatedly procrastinates. He visits a brothel with his friend Bloch. He renounces his relations with Gilberte but sees her out walking with a young man and is troubled by his emotional response. In Part Two, ‘Place-names: The Place’, he travels to Balbec with his grandmother and Françoise, with a view to improving his health. His excessive anticipations mean that the reality of Balbec is at first a disappointment. He becomes familiar with the intellectual aristocrat Robert de Saint-Loup and his uncle, the enigmatic Baron de Charlus. The Narrator and Saint-Loup meet the painter, Elstir, a key tutelary figure, whose studio resembles a laboratory for a new creation of the world. Elstir introduces the Narrator to the band of young girls who add an unprecedented new dimension to his existence. Amongst them is Albertine Simonet, upon whom his scattered attentions ultimately converge. Balbec offers seemingly unlimited opportunities for exploration and discovery – sociological, intellectual, sexual – but Albertine refuses his kiss, the season ends, the holiday-makers must part. He returns to Paris wiser to the world, charged with yet more curiosity, but little closer to fulfilling his vocation.

The French title A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs has a strangeness (how can young girls be ‘in flower’ and who or what could be ‘in their shadow’?) which is rather diluted in the English Within a Budding Grove.3 Both titles, however, suggest organic growth and, perhaps more than any other, this volume gives a sense of genuine forward movement as we follow the Narrator’s maturation in love and in matters of art and society. The part-revelations of