Remembrance of Things Past, Volume 1 - Within a Budding Grove

Proust, now a teenager, describes his first separation from his mother, a vacation taken in a high class beach resort in Normandy. Besides the fleeting visions of young girls, he also keenly observes, without acidity but detached amusement, the petty sophistry of the French upper class in its genteel environs, safely removed from the lower ones. “An important social question is to know whether the pane of glass will always protect the feast of the marvelous beasts and if the obscure people peering at them through the night will not come and pick them out of their aquarium and eat them.”