On pg 578 of Within a Budding Grove, the narrator learns the name of “the young cyclist” is Albertine Simonet. This immediately struck me after Trevor’s lecture and shedding light on Proust lover Albert. The feeling portrayed through this passage is very real and familiar of having the desire to meet someone, but you need a common friend to act as your medium. Was this Proust telling the story of his meeting with Albert? We know he was Proust driver. Was the bicycle metaphoric for Albert’s car? He was clearly passionate when he wrote these pages. Referring to Elstir as “a rainbow bridging a gulf between our terraqueous  world and regions which I had before thought inaccessible”. It seems clear to me that he saw Albert, or our narrator saw Albertine as an unobtainable being, and Elstir was his only hope to make this connection.  As for the rainbow; I’m unclear if he views Elstir as a new vibrant ray of hope connecting him to Albert/Albertine, or is the rainbow symbolic of a bridge physically connecting they’re existence, but in a way that’s intangible. You can see the connection, but remains physically disconnected.  Either way, he’s becoming smitten with the idea of Albert/Albertine, and hopes this meeting will result in Elstir inviting him/her in and break down the “barriers” between’ them. When this doesn’t happen, and Albertine merely says hello while passing by, I can feel his tension go through the roof! There would be a moment of deflation because what he hoped would transpire is now continuing down the rd. On the other hand, he’s now identified a common person to make this connection!

As a teenage boy we are often excited to meet girls, but somewhat terrified because we’re really just learning to approach and talk to those we are attracted to. Just to further this excitement, our narrator also discovers Elstir is friendly with the whole band of guttersnipe! Thanks to a very descriptive memory, he was able to describe each of the girls to Elstir and gather their names too. Could you imagine that you not only have a connection to one beautiful person, but a whole group!

But what of social standing? Where did Albert/Albertine and the band of guttersnipes fall in this food chain? Did Proust have this same confliction with Albert as our narrator does with Albertine, or was this written for the sake of defining middle class? What a foreign concept. This was a time of has or has not, so this confusion is completely understandable. Then when he understands these girls’ social standing, he turns to some bold adjectives describing middle class offspring.  He refers to them as nymphs, and further the “social metamorphosis” of this group he found so desirable. I wouldn’t normally take metamorphosis so poorly if not paired with nymphs. They’ve now been reduced to insects. But then refers to the mistake over classification so harsh that it has the same instantaneousness as a chemical reaction, because he put them in almost a smutty realm of being toys of a racing cyclist, or a prize fighters. In reality though these guttersnipes were the likely daughters of respectable parents such as lawyers. His first impressions were so powerful though that when recalled our narrator cannot fully link the actual Albertine with the first impressions of her because his opinion was so drastically different at each of these time frames.

Now for the time being, Elstir has fallen from the pedestal of divinity the narrator had placed him. He’s suddenly become a pawn in this chess match, and the narrator has plans to use him as such. Only Elstir has unknowingly foiled him by remaining in his groove to complete the piece he’s working before taking this walk. While fuming internally about why this is taking so long he fumbles though some of Elstir’s old sketches until he comes to one of “Miss Sacripant”. It’s captivating, but he doesn’t want to alert Elstir to this because it might very well further delay him meeting with the girls. Still he can’t remove himself from it. When he speaks up about it, Elstir tries to play it off as though it was just some silly thing he did as a young man. Until our narrator asks, “What has become of the model?” Then in an almost flustered moment Elstir insist that nothing was ever there between he and the model, but this should be put away quickly before Gabrielle comes. Before putting it away though, Elstir looks at this sketch a little deeper and criticizes his own work.

Gabrielle has come now, and our narrator is pissed because he knows it’s too late. The girls would be long gone. As he looks at Gabrielle, he thinks she is well past her prime, and just not very good looking to wear a man like Elstir on her arm. But then he looks closer at Elstir’s work, and realizes that she is truly a thing of beauty. This has obviously become a reoccurring theme, but here it is again. This time Elstir even gets into it though by having somewhat of an out of body experience as he realizes she is in all of his work. She is beautiful, and to have her would be comparable to stumbling across a Titan in your local Goodwill. She is his living portrait.