Ian "Marvin" Graye's Reviews > In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

A Note about the Translation

I wanted to support the translation of this volume by James Grieve, a lecturer at my alma mater, Australian National University, when I was there in the 70’s.

I’m pretty sure he taught two of my close friends. While I can’t recall meeting him, I did socialise with one of his colleagues, Robert Dessaix, who subsequently became a talented writer.

It was a very capable French Department. However, in the 90’s, it was decimated by budget cuts and Grieve was made "redundant". He subsequently undertook a full teaching load for no remuneration, declining an opportunity to move to Sydney, so he could continue to cycle everywhere around Canberra and continue his commitment to the cause of French language and literature. ANU hasn’t even updated his CV to give him credit for this translation (which for what it’s worth was the favourite of Alain de Botton).

I approached Grieve’s translation a little sceptically at first. I still have a few quibbles (he translated "petite bande" as a "little gang" of girls, which you might do for punks, but I wonder about middle class girls, even if they were perceived as unruly). However, I quickly stopped paying attention to the translation and focussed on the pleasures of the text.

A Note about the Title

The novel continues and extends Proust’s literary analysis of love, focussing mainly on the narrator’s journey through late adolescence and his early sexual experiences (at ages 15 to 20, unless I’m mistaken).

The title of the Grieve translation is "In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower", in contrast to the Kilmartin translation "Within a Budding Grove".

Taken separately, it’s difficult to determine the intended meaning of each alternative title.

To what extent is sexuality implicit in the title?

This question reminded me of the title of Chapter 28 of Thomas Hardy’s "Far from the Madding Crowd", a highly sexually-charged chapter that goes by the name "The Hollow Amid the Ferns".

"Within a Budding Grove" might simply refer to a forest of trees, which bud in winter in preparation for spring, a fairly innocuous translation, if still a metaphor.

There is also an English song which might have been known to the translators:

"Yet soon the lovely days of Spring
Will leaf the budding grove."

The budding could also be symbolic of the adolescent experience and puberty of both genders, since females are not mentioned in this version.

On the other hand, given the literal meaning of the French title, the "budding grove" might be a more pointed reference to female puberty, a "rosebud" being slang for female genitalia (see also its significance in "Citizen Kane").

Grieve’s translation is more literal. The young women are in flower (or in bloom), a metaphor for puberty. Perhaps the shadow refers to the darkness of the girls’ transition to adulthood or the fact that they tower metaphorically over the narrator and cast a shadow over his life and social and sexual experiences?

What, There’s More?

After the tour de force that was the first volume, it still amazes me that Proust was able to continue writing about love with such insight, sophistication and wit (and there are more volumes to come).

He keeps finding new things to say, all of which seem to be definitive in their analysis.

Proust possessed amazing powers of observation. In the first volume they were directed partly at his own childhood relationship with his mother, but mainly at the relationship of Charles Swann and Odette de Crecey.

The second volume continues the scrutiny of Swann and the now Madame Swann, but the narrator moves to centre stage.

He is an older and greater participant in the action. However, even this statement has to be qualified in the case of Proust.

The great bulk of the text is what occurs in the narrator’s mind, as he responds to events and stimuli around him. He is still an acute observer. He doesn’t just look and think, he reviews, he criticizes, he critiques, as if every aspect of life is a literary or aesthetic experience.

At times, it approaches the lyrical and the musical, as if Proust were composing a symphony or an opera assembled from his responses and interactions.

The sensation of touch is not enough. He must cerebrally process the sensation and convert it into art. An animal can touch and feel, only a human can create Art. Proust worked at the pinnacle of what a human can fashion from their life experience.



Catherine Deneuve as Madame Odette Swann in the film of "Time Regained"

At Madame Swann’s

It quickly becomes apparent that Odette de Crecey from Volume 1 has married Charles Swann and had a daughter Gilberte, who is a similar age to the unnamed Marcel and is aged from 15 to 18 during the first section of the volume.

Odette divided opinion in volume 1, because she was a high class courtesan. Her marriage to Swann surprised Paris’ polite society and there are still many who scorn her. However, despite all expectations, it seems that their marriage has been a success, at least to the extent that it has been mutually advantageous, which after all is possibly the least we can expect of any marriage.

There are unresolved implications of dual infidelity, but they are back story and not the focus of this volume.

Swann has lifted Odette into High Society, and she is grateful. Odette has given Swann a daughter, who loves him, despite being equally strong-willed, but just as importantly Odette confers on Swann a "purely private satisfaction" that cements their relationship.

The status of the Swann family, despite Swann’s Jewish background, allows Odette to establish a successful literary salon, but also to redesign herself.

Her complexion is dark. In volume 1, her beauty was always played down. Now, "she seemed to have grown so many years younger, she had filled out, enjoyed better health, looked calmer, cooler, more relaxed". Her new pattern was "full of majesty and charm". She wore "this immutable model of eternal youth". At the same time, whatever she wore:

"...encompassed her like the delicate and etherealized epitome of a civilization."

These qualities are, apparently, attractive in a woman.

While Marcel purports to be in love with Gilberte, he is at least partly in love with Odette as well. Alternatively, he actually wants to be Odette, if only so that he can partner Swann, whom he admires. [This is not a simple relationship.]



Picasso’s "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon"

See Jim Everett's allusion to this painting here on Proust Reader 


At Balbec

Two years later, presumably when Marcel is about 18 to 20, his health requires him to spend a few seasons at the beach resort town of Balbec.

He uses this time to forget his love for Gilberte. Instead, his attention is drawn to a "petite bande" of "jeunes filles en fleurs".

This provides the set up for much contemplation on the subject matter of volume 1, memory and the nature of love, as well as the complications introduced by adolescent sexuality.

It’s these issues I’d like to focus on for the rest of this review. I hope you’ll forgive me if I resort to the abstract or the impersonal, so as not necessarily to reveal the object of Marcel’s affection and spoil your reading of the novel.

A Critique of Pure Devotion

In volume 1, we learn much about the nature of love from the point of view of Swann, as narrated by Marcel. Presumably, the narrative was dictated at a later phase of his life. Here, we see him undergoing his own adolescent experiences, even if they were narrated subsequently.

We learn what the older Marcel knows, only not in chronological order. Proust adheres to a subjective order of revelation, which in a way reflects the fact that memory itself is not chronological. It prioritises itself according to laws that we might never know or understand.

From now on, I'd like to allow Proust's words to speak for themselves as much as possible.

The Subjectivity of Love

The Object of Our Affection is what we make of them:

"Love creates a supplementary person who is quite different from the one who bears our beloved’s name in the outside world and is mostly formed from elements within ourselves."

"Love having become so immense, we never reflect on how small a part the woman herself plays in it."

You love me, because I made you love me:

"This real Albertine was little more than an outline: everything else that had been added to her was of my own making, for our own contribution to our love – even if judged solely from the point of view of quantity – is greater than that of the person we love."

You’ll be my mirror:

"When we are in love, our love is too vast to be wholly contained within ourselves; it radiates outward, reaches the resistant surface of the loved one, which reflects it back to its starting point; and this return of our own tenderness is what we see as the other’s feelings, working their new, enhanced charm on us, because we do not recognise them as having originating in ourselves.”

The Conjunction of Love and Pain

"Whatever I longed for would be mine only at the end of a painful pursuit...this supreme goal could be achieved only on condition that I sacrifice to it the pleasure I had hoped to find in it."

The Quest for Beauty as a Source of Love and Life

"I 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."

"Looking at her, I was filled with that renewed longing for life which any fresh glimpse of beauty and happiness can bring."

The Desire to Please, to Possess and to Penetrate

In order to gain love, you must make the acquaintance of the one you desire and then seek their approval:

"I was not yet old enough, and had remained too sensitive, to have given up the wish to please others and to possess them."

First, you have to enter their field of vision and engage them in conversation:

"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."

Sometimes, a kiss is not enough. You must incite admiration, desire and memory:

"Just as it would not have been enough for me, in kissing her, to take pleasure from her lips without giving her any in return, so I wished that the idea of me, in entering her, in becoming part of her, might attract not only her attention, but her admiration, her desire, and might force it to keep a memory of me against the day when I might be able to benefit from it."

The Relevance of Physical Intimacy

"I had thought the love I felt for Albertine did not depend on any hope of physical intimacy."

The Unattainability of the Love Object

"Love, mobile and pre-existing, focuses on the image of a certain woman simply because she will be almost certainly unattainable."

Sometimes, it’s not impossible, just difficult:

"I was inclined to magnify the simplest of pleasures because of the obstacles that lay between me and the possibility of enjoying them."

The Attainability of the Love Object

The more easily attainable the love, the less the pleasure:

"The main reason for the shrinking of the pleasure to which I had been so looking forward was the knowledge that nothing could now prevent me from enjoying it."

The Possession of the Love Object

"Our love too seems to have vanished at the very moment when we come into possession of a prize the value of which we have never really thought about."

The Postponement of Gratification

"It is seldom that a joy is promptly paired with the desire that longed for it."

The more you dally, the greater the dalliance:

"What monotony and boredom color the lives of those who drive directly…without ever daring to dally along the way with what they desire!"

But don’t dally too long:

"It is not certain that the happiness that comes too late, at a time when one can no longer enjoy it, when one is no longer in love, is exactly the same happiness for which we once pined in vain. There is only one person – our former self – who could decide the issue; and that self is no longer with us."

Be wary of sabotage and self-denial:

"The only thing I cared for, my relationship with Gilberte, was the very thing I was trying to sabotage, through my prolonging of our separation, through my gradual fostering not of her indifference toward me, but – which would come to the same thing in the end – of mine toward her. My unremitting effort was directed to bringing about the slow, agonizing suicide of the self that loved Gilberte."

Self-denial should not be conditional, lest the conditions not be met:

"...unless she made an unambiguous request for us to clarify our relationship, accompanied by a full declaration of her love for me, both of which I knew were impossible..."

The Satisfaction of One Desire Creates Another

"To possess a little more of her would only increase our need for the part of her that we do not possess; and in any case, within our part, since our needs arise out of our satisfactions, something of her would still lie forever beyond our grasp."

The Coincidence of Desire and Reality

"When reality coincides at last with something we have longed for, fitting perfectly with our dreams, it can cover them up entirely and become indistinguishable from them, as two symmetrical figures placed against one another seem to become one; whereas, so as to give our joy its full intensity of meaning, we would actually prefer every detail of our desires, even at the instant of fulfillment, to retain the presence of still being immaterial, so as to be more certain that this really is what we desired."

The Source of Our Memory

"The things that are best at reminding us of a person are those which, because they were insignificant, we have forgotten, and which have therefore lost none of their power. Which is why the greater part of our memory exists outside us, in a dampish breeze, in the musty air of a bedroom or the smell of autumn’s first fires, things through which we can retrieve any part of us that the reasoning mind, having no use for it, disdained, the last vestige of the past, the best of it, the part which, after all our tears seem to have dried, can make us weep again."

The Habits of Love

"This recurrence of pain and the renewal of my love for Gilberte did not last longer than they would have in a dream of her, for the very reason that my life at Balbec was free of the habits that in usual circumstances would have helped it to prevail. It was because of Habit that I had become more and more indifferent to Gilberte."

The Mutability of Love

"If we consciously or unconsciously outgrow those associations, our love, as though it was a spontaneous growth, a thing of our own making, revives and offers itself to another woman."

"There was in me a residue of old dreams of love, dating from my childhood, full of all the tenderness my heart was capable of, all the love it had ever felt, and which was now indistinguishable from it, which could be suddenly brought back to me by someone as different as possible from me."

"This liking for new places and people is of course worked into our forgetting of older ones."

The Indivisibility of Love

"My feeling was no longer the simple attraction of the first days: it was an incipient, tentative love for each or any of them, every single one of them being a natural substitute for any of the others."

The Resemblance of Our Love Objects

"There is a degree of resemblance between the women we love at different times; and this resemblance, though it devolves, derives from the unchanging nature of our own temperament, which is what selects them, by ruling out all those who are not likely to be both opposite and complementary to us, who cannot be relied on, that is, to gratify our sensuality and wound our heart. Such women are a product of our temperament, an inverted image or projection, a negative of our sensitivity."

You Are Too Like Me for Me To Love

"It was impossible for any love of mine for Andree to be true: she was too intellectual, too highly-strung, too prone to ailment, too much like myself. Though Albertine now seemed empty, Andree was full of something with which I was overfamiliar."

The Shadow

"At those moments in my life when I was not in love but wished I was, the ideal of physical beauty I carried about with me...was partnered by the emotional shadow, ever ready to be brought to real life, of the woman who was going to fall in love with me and step straight into the part already written for her...in the comedy of fondness and passion that had been awaiting her since my childhood...as long as she had a pleasant disposition and some of the physical characteristics required by the role."

Love or Enjoyment

"I sensed that those who know love and those who enjoy life are not the same people."




Emmanuelle Béart as Gilberte in the film of “Time Regained”


At the Zoo
[After and in the Words of Proust]

Madame Swann's
Easy step
Gave her coat
A loose and
Lazy sway.
Noticing,
I conferred
A shy glance,
Subtle but
Admiring,
Upon which,
Detected,
I was then
Rewarded
With a wink
Of her eye
And a slow
Flirtatious
Smile. Oh what
Ecstasy.


Ill Bergotten
[After and in the Words of Proust]

Matter-of-fact
And overrich,
The familiar,
Did he eschew.
Not content to
Toe the line, hence
Approached from some
Petty angle,
His ideas
Always sounded
Unbeauteous,
Wearisome and
Convoluted:
"A Cartesian
Devil, vainly
Endeavouring
To endure
Eternally
In equipoise."
Smartness for the
Sake of smartness,
Thus, were his words
Twisted around.
Ephemeral,
But not profound.


Avenue du Bois-de-Boulogne
[After and in the Words of Proust]

Madame Swann sauntered along the
Avenue du Bois-de-Boulogne,
Mellow, gentle, smiling and stately,
At the peak of wealth and beauty,
Delectable in the blooming
Summer season of her lifetime,
From which glorious point she watched
Worlds turn beneath her measured tread,
Until Prince de Sagan spied her.

His greeting evoked chivalry,
Polite and allegorical,
A noble homage to Woman,
Since recalled by Proust after noon
Any fine day in May, a glimpse
Of Madame Swann chatting with him
In the glow of wisteria.
Satisfied, at peace, in love, his
Spirit freed from hysteria.


Une Petite Bande
[After and in the Words of Proust]

Look there, far away
On the esplanade,
Making a strange mass
Of moving colours,
Five or six young girls
All as different
In their appearance
And their ways from the
Other bathers as
The odd gaggle of
Seagulls strutting on
The beach, wings flapping.