During Patrick McMahon’s close reading with the class a lot of in depth and critical ideas were brought up in relation to the text of Within A Budding Grove. In light of this I want to explore the pages of 514-515, a piece which I see as one of Proust’s confession’s.

On page 514 after continuing his meanderings about the “mean girls” strutting through town, Proust writes “All the advantages which, in our ordinary environment, extend and enhance us, we there find to have become invisible, in fact eliminated; while on the other hand the people whom we suppose, without reason, to enjoy similar advantages appear to us amplified to artificial dimensions”. The narrator (or Proust), is suggesting that those whom he judges so harshly share the same advantages, namely intellectual, that he has, thus I suppose justifying his judgments.Then, he says, those who share these advantages of his, appear to him “amplified to artificial dimensions”.

There is no doubt that with many characters, Proust does just this: amplifies them to artificial dimensions. In fact, in the previous passage about the “mean girls”, Proust spends pages, building up these girls into artificial caricatures. They are “birds”, an “exclusive gang”, “noble and calm models of human beauty that I beheld”, with their “bold, hard and frivolous natures”. He slings all sorts of contrasting descriptions and attributes upon them in the span of a seconds and the nature of their true character, we will never know, because it is left in the wreckage. As the narrator explains “I had dealt them like cards into so many heaps to compose” (508). He deals quickly and without care and before the reader knows it, we are on to the next topic, broken by the many harsh and beautiful ideas of the characters just described.

In the next paragraph (514-515) he continues “As I had so often thought when Mme de Villeparisis’s carriage bore me away, that at closer quarters, if I had stopped for a moment, certain details, a pock-marked skin, a flaw in the nostrils, a gawping expression, a grimace of a smile, an ugly figure, might have been substituted, in the face and body of the woman for those that I doubtless imagined; for no more than a pretty outline, the glimpse of a fresh complexion, had sufficed for me to add, in entire good faith, a ravishing shoulder, a delicious glance of which I carried in my mind for ever a memory or a preconceived idea“.

Here he is stating outright, that one glance and one feature of a person allows him to create a whole caricature from his imagination. The narrator already has a wealth of preconceived ideas in his head and when he observes one of these girls, he has taken his ideas, whether beautiful or grotesque and in seconds has a spun a whole creature together which he then presents to us.