Within A Budding Grove is the second volume of Marcel Proust's masterpiece, In Search Of Lost Time. It was first published in 1918, after a delay of some four years due to the First World War. It was published by Gallimard, who remained Proust's publisher for the rest of his life. In 1919, it was awarded the Prix Goncourt, France's most esteemed literary prize.
Told over three chapters – Madame Swann at Home, Place-Names: The Place, and Seascape, With Frieze Of Girls – it sees the introduction of two key characters, the Narrator's great love Albertine, and his closest friend Robert de Saint-Loup. It's also where we get to meet more fully the painter Elstir, who is to have a profound impact on the Narrator's aesthetic sensibility.
Set between Paris and the coastal resort of Balbec, the volume traces the Narrator's transition into adolescence and growing romantic desires, exploring the gaps and tensions between idealised expectation and reality.
Like Swann's Way before it, this journey recalls our own, calling to mind the feelings and emotions of youth, and the intellectual quest initiated by the world's incremental tumescence, as we begin to find our way and reckon with its curious blooms.
