The Captive (The Modern Library of the World's Best Books, ML 120)

563, [3] pp. The fifth of seven parts in Proust's magnum opus, The Remembrance of Things Past (sometimes translated as In Search of Lost Time). 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.