WITHIN A BUDDING GROVE by MARCEL PROUST TRANSLATED BY C. K. SCOTT MONCRIEFF THE MODERN LIBRARY PUBLISHERS: NEW YORK _Copyright_, 1924, _By_ THOMAS SELTZER TRANSLATOR'S DEDICATION _To_ K. S. S. That _men in armour may be born With serpents' teeth the field is sown; Rains mould, winds bend, suns gild the corn Too quickly ripe, too early mown._ _I scan the quivering beads, behold The features, catch the whispered breath Of friends long garnered in the cold Unopening granaries of death_, _Whose names in solemn cadence ring Across my slow oblivious page. Their friendship was a finer thing Than fame, or wealth, or honoured age._ _And--while you live and I--shall last Its tale of seasons with us yet Who cherish, in the undying The men we never can forget._ Bad Kissingen, C. K. S. M. July 31, 1923. CONTENTS PART I Madame Swann at Home _A break in the narrative: old friends in new aspects--The Marquis de Norpois--Bergotte--How I cease for the time being to see Gilberte: a general outline of the sorrow caused by a parting and of the irregular process of oblivion._ Place-Names: The Place _My first visit to Balbec_ PART II Place-Names: The Place (continued) _First impressions of M. de Charlus and of Robert de Saint-Loup--Dinner with Bloch and his family._ Seascape, with Frieze of Girls _Dinners at Rivebelle--Enter Albertine._ WITHIN A BUDDING GROVE PART I _MADAME SWANN AT HOME_ My mother, when it was a question of our having M. de Norpois to dinner for the first time, having expressed her regret that Professor Cottard was away from home, and that she herself had quite ceased to see anything of Swann, since either of these might have helped to entertain the old Ambassador, my father replied that so eminent a guest, so distinguished a man of science as Cottard could never be out of place at a dinner-table, but that Swann, with his ostentation, his habit of crying aloud from the house-tops the name of everyone that he knew, however slightly, was an impossible vulgarian whom the Marquis de Norpois would be sure to dismiss as--to use his own epithet--a "pestilent" fellow. Now, this attitude on my father's part may be felt to require a few words of explanation, inasmuch as some of us, no doubt, remember a Cottard of distinct mediocrity and a Swann by whom modesty and discretion, in all his social relations, were carried to the utmost refinement of delicacy. But in his case, what had happened was that, to the original "young Swann" and also to the Swann of the Jockey Club, our old friend had added a fresh personality (which was not to be his last) that of Odette's husband. Adapting to the humble ambitions of that lady the instinct, the desire, the industry which he had always had, he had laboriously constructed for himself, a long way beneath the old, a new position more appropriate to the companion who was to share it with him. In this he shewed himself another man. Since (while he continued to go,