From "This day, as on the preceding days, Saint-Loup..." to "...nothing remains but a tiny glowing gap of blue."
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A passage that reflects both the actual title and the more approximate one -- Within a Budding Grove -- of the Scott Moncrieff translation.
The narrator tells us that his "health was going from bad to worse" and that he "was at one of those times of youth when the idle heart, unoccupied by love for a particular person, lies in wait for Beauty, seeking it everywhere, as the man in love sees and desires in all things the woman he cherishes." And he finds it, while waiting outside the Grand-Hôtel for his grandmother, in a "gang of girls" that he first glimpses far away along the esplanade. One girl pushes a bicycle, two others carry golf clubs, "and their accoutrements made a flagrant contrast with the appearance of other young girls in Balbec." They stride along together, swaggering almost, and careless of other people strolling in their path, sometimes even bumping into them.
He characterizes their attitude as one of complete indifference to others, which he regards as unique.
[F]or love, hence fear, of the crowd is one of the most powerful motives in all individuals, whether they wish to please others, astonish them, or show that they despise them. In a recluse, the most irrevocable, lifelong rejection of the world often has as its basis an uncontrolled passion for the crowd, of such force that, finding when he does go out that he cannot win the admiration of a concierge, passerby, or even the coachman halted at the corner, he prefers to spend his life out of their sight, and gives up all activities that would make it necessary to leave the house.
Is Proust talking about himself here?
Gradually he begins to distinguish one girl from another as they draw closer, but before he does he perceives "the uninterrupted flow of a shared, unstable, and elusive beauty." They represent for him "the new interest in sports, spreading now even among the working classes, and in physical training without any concomitant training of the mind.... For surely these were noble and tranquil models of human beauty that met my eye, against the sea, like statues in the sun along a shore in Greece."
Their erotic potential becomes strong as they come nearer, for "in none of my conjectures did I entertain the possibility that they might be chaste." He is struck in particular by "the brunette with the full cheeks and the bicycle," and though she is not the one he liked the best, because Gilberte's golden skin and "fairish ginger hair" had become his "unattainable ideal," he centers his attention on her after their eyes meet.
I knew I could never possess the young cyclist, unless I could also possess what lay behind her eyes. My desire for her was desire for her whole life: a desire that was full of pain, because I sensed it was unattainable, but also full of heady excitement, because what had been my life up to that moment had suddenly ceased to be all of life, had turned into a small corner of a great space opening up for me, which I longed to explore.
We have seen him obsessed with the desire for possession -- both body and mind -- before, in the encounter with the village girl in Carqueville, where he similarly experienced the concept of "replacing sensual pleasure with the idea of penetrating someone's life." And he likens his experience with "this little sauntering gang of girls" to his encounters with "those fleeting passersby on the road," the ones he fantasizes about but knows he will never re-encounter. "If they had been offered to me by a madam -- in the sort of house that, as has been seen, I did not disdain -- divorced from the element that lent them so many colors and such attractive imprecision, they would have been less enchanting."
No actress, no peasant girl, no boarder in a convent school had ever been so beautiful to me, so fascinating in a suggestion of the unknown, so invaluably precious, so probably unattainable. The exemplar these girls offered of life's potential for bringing unexpected happiness was so full of charm, in a state of such perfection, that it was almost for intellectual reasons that I despaired of ever being able to experience ... the profound mystery to be found in the beauty one has longed for, the beauty one replaces ... by seeking mere pleasure from women one has not desired ... with the result that one dies without ever having enjoyed that other form of fulfillment.
He knows, "having botanized so much among such young blossoms, that it would be impossible to come upon a bouquet of rarer varieties than these buds."
From "Like a rare species of shrub..." to "...or failed to recognize a god."
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We begin today "within a budding grove," as it were. Or rather, riding through orchards that have recently lost their blossoms. The narrator's reflections on remembering these orchards when he bought apple branches in Paris the following spring and gazed on the pink buds amid the white blossoms may have given Scott Moncrieff the inspiration for his title for this volume, which Grieve translates more literally.
We learn more about Mme. de Villeparisis, whose familiarity with the arts makes it seem "that she looked upon painting, music, literature, and philosophy as merely the unavoidable accomplishments of any young girl given an aristocratic upbringing and happening to live in a building famous enough to figure on the list of national monuments. She gave the impression of believing that the only paintings worth anything are the ones you inherit." Despite this aristocratic attitude, she is something of a radical. "She was in favor of the Republic; and her only objection against its anticlericalism she expressed as follows: 'I should be as much against being prevented from going to Mass if I wanted to go as I should be against being made to go to Mass if I didn't want to go!'"
On the other hand, she and the narrator have a bit of a falling out over literature. She dismisses his enthusiasm for Chateaubriand, Balzac, and Victor Hugo -- "all of whom had been guests in her parents' house, and whom she herself had even glimpsed" -- in favor of some now-forgotten figures whom she regarded as having "qualities of measured judgment and simplicity in which she had been taught to see the mark of genuine worth." And she quotes Sainte-Beuve to the effect that "one should take the word of people who knew them at first hand and could size them up properly." As Grieve tells us in his note, this is the opposite of Proust's insistence that one should judge the work and not the creator.
As they ride through the countryside, the narrator indulges once again his fantasies about the women he sees there, and reveals that "Bloch had ... opened a whole new era for me by informing me that ... every single one of these girls, from the village girl to the smart lady, was ready and willing to oblige me." But he also reveals that he has learned that inaccessibility is a great sauce to desire, that "beauty is a succession of hypotheses" and that "I have never met in real life any girls as desirable as the ones I saw when in the company of some important personage who baffled all my ingenious attempts to get rid of him." And he recalls once leaping from a carriage in which he was riding with a friend of his father's to chase after a woman he saw in the street, only to find, when he caught up with her, that he was "face-to-face with the aging Mme Verdurin, whom I usually avoided like the plague."
While sightseeing an old church in Carqueville, he spots a village girl who is fishing from a bridge. "It was not only her body I was after, it was the person living inside it, with whom there can be only one mode of touching, which is to attract her attention, and one mode of penetration, which is to put an idea into her mind." And so he contrives a way to mention that he is traveling with "the Marquise de Villeparisis. "I was simultaneously aware that I had lost not only my anxiety at perhaps not being able to see her again, but with it part of my desire to do so.... As happens with physical possession, this forcible insertion of myself into her mind, this disembodied possession of her, had taken away some of her mystery."
But not all of his experiences on these rides are erotic. One is an account of a failed epiphany -- "a feeling of profound bliss, rather like the feeling I had once had from things such as the steeples of Martinville." He has a sensation of déjà vu on seeing three trees "making a pattern that I knew I had seen somewhere before."
I watched the trees as they disappeared, waving at me in despair and seeming to say, "Whatever you fail to learn from us today you will never learn. If you let us fall by this wayside where we stood striving to reach you, a whole part of your self that we brought for you will return forever to nothing."... I never did find out what it was these particular trees had attempted to convey to me, or where it was that I had seen them.... I was as sad as though I had just lost a friend or felt something die in myself, as though I had broken a promise to a dead man or failed to recognize a god.
It's an enigmatic passage at best, especially puzzling because he has already flagged for us the earlier experience with the three steeples that seemed to him truly epiphanic.
