In Search of Lost Time: Within a Budding Grove V. 2 (Revised) Paperback - 1998

First line

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 the herself had quite ceased to see anything of Swann, since either of these might have helped to entertain the ex-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 form the house-tops the name of everyone he knew, however slightly, was a vulgar show-off whom the Marquis de Norpois would be sure to dismiss as-to use his own epithet-a "pestilent" fellow.

From the jacket flap

First published in 1919, "Within a Budding Grove was awarded the Prix Goncourt, bringing the author immediate fame. In this second volume of "In Search of Lost Time, the narrator turns from the childhood reminiscences of "Swann's Way to memories of his adolescence. Having gradually become indifferent to Swann's daughter Gilberte, the narrator visits the seaside resort of Balbec with his grandmother and meets a new object of attention--Albertine, "a girl with brilliant, laughing eyes and plump, matt cheeks."
For this authoritative English-language edition, D. J. Enright has revised the late Terence Kilmartin's acclaimed reworking of C. K. Scott Moncrieff's translation to take into account the new definitive French editions of "A la recherche du temps perdu (the final volume of these new editions was published by the Bibliotheque de la Pleiade in 1989).

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“It is marvelously about life.” —Terence Kilmartin