7.43 Proust — À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs — Epoché
What you will be able to do Read the passage of Proust's À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs in which the narrator first sees the band of girls on the promenade at Balbec. Follow the longest sentences of the course, with their brackets, dashes and comparisons inside comparisons. Recognise how Proust turns a moment of looking into a reflection on desire, society and the unknown life of another person. Read Proust's comparisons, which move from seagulls to Greek statues and a comet, and on to a planet seen through a telescope. Sentences from this text, before the notes. Read the French aloud; all of them come back below. French English presque encore à l’extrémité de la digue où elles faisaient mouvoir une tache singulière, still almost at the far end of the promenade, where they made a strange patch move, incapables de subir un attrait d’ordre intellectuel ou moral, incapable of feeling any attraction of an intellectual or moral kind, Elles n’avaient à l’égard de ce qui n’était pas de leur groupe aucune affectation de mépris, leur mépris sincère suffisait. Towards whatever was not of their group they had no affectation of contempt; their sincere contempt was enough. fièrement assise devant le kiosque de musique, proudly seated in front of the bandstand, La tribune des musiciens formait au-dessus de lui un tremplin naturel et tentant sur lequel sans une hésitation l’aînée de la petite bande se mit à courir : The musicians' stand formed above him a natural and tempting springboard, onto which the eldest of the little band ran without a moment's hesitation: un agrégat de forme irrégulière, compact, insolite et piaillant, a cluster of irregular shape, compact, unusual and squawking, Prerequisites : 7.42 — this reading follows 7.42 Reading . You read the opening of Du côté de chez Swann and the madeleine in 7.32 Reading ; the nuance of 5.27 Vocabulary and the literary forms of 5.28 Vocabulary , especially the imperfect subjunctive, will help. About this text À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs is the second volume of Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu . It appeared in 1919 and won the Goncourt prize. In its second half the young narrator, sickly and timid, spends a summer with his grandmother at Balbec, an imaginary seaside resort on the coast of Normandy. His friend Saint-Loup is away; he waits alone outside the Grand-Hôtel . Then, at the far end of the promenade, he sees five or six girls coming towards him, like nobody else in Balbec. This lesson gives about 3,200 words without omissions, from the narrator alone on the promenade to his first exchange of looks with one of the girls, a dark cyclist in a polo cap. She is Albertine, who will become the great love and the great torment of the rest of the novel. The text is that of the first edition, published in Paris by the Nouvelle Revue française (Gallimard) in 1919, as transcribed in French Wikisource. Reading Proust's long sentences Holding the thread. Proust's sentences are long because they follow a thought as it unfolds, with every qualification in its place. Read them in three passes: first find the main subject and verb; then the clauses that depend on them; then the brackets and dashes, which are side-thoughts. In the second paragraph the skeleton is je restai … quand … je vis s'avancer cinq ou six fillettes ; everything else is about how they looked. Comparisons. The girls are first a flock of seagulls walking on the beach, then des statues exposées au soleil sur un rivage de la Grèce , then a lumineuse comète , then a procession on an antique frieze. Each comparison lifts them further away from the narrator, until they seem as unreachable as figures in a painting. From seeing to knowing. At first the girls are a single moving shape; the narrator cannot tell which eyes belong to which face. Then he distinguishes them one by one. Then, meeting the cyclist's eyes, he wonders what he could be for her, and compares the question to looking at a planet through a telescope. To desire her, he realises, is to desire her whole unknown life. Social comedy. Before the girls arrive, Proust describes the respectable people on the promenade, all pretending not to look at each other and bumping into each other as a result. The girls, by contrast, ignore everyone, and one of them jumps over an old banker sitting in a folding chair. Reading it a second time, part by part Alone. The narrator, ill and shy, sees beauty everywhere and dares to approach no one. The arrival. Five or six girls appear at the end of the promenade, one pushing a bicycle, two carrying golf clubs. The promenade. The respectable bathers walk stiffly under the lorgnette of the chief magistrate's wife, watching each other in secret. The band. The girls move freely, contemptuous of everyone; the narrator cannot yet tell them apart. He imagines a social class that produces beautiful bodies, like a school of sculpture. The jump. The tallest girl jumps over an old banker's head; another mocks him in slang. Faces. Now he distinguishes them: the tall one, the one with green eyes, the dark one with a straight nose, the one in a cape, the cyclist. He decides that they must be the young mistresses of racing cyclists. The look. The cyclist's eyes meet his. He wonders what world she sees him from, and desires her whole life, which he cannot reach. Full translation An English translation of the whole text, made for this course and kept close to the original. The numbers are the paragraph numbers of the original text, so you can move between the two. In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower That day, like the days before, Saint-Loup had been obliged to go to Doncières , where, until he went back there for good, they would now always need him until the end of the afternoon. I was sorry that he was not at Balbec. I had seen young women step down from carriages and go in, some into the ballroom of the Casino, others into the ice-cream shop, who from a distance had seemed delightful to