It evokes summer scenes painted by the impressionists and, indeed, Elstir is modelled in part on Monet. He meets the painter Elstir and a gang of sporty girls, with whom he falls collectively in love. The narrator, now a young man, is staying with his grandmother at the Grand Hotel.

This volume takes place in the fashionable fictional seaside resort of Balbec. “In the shade of the girls in bloom” doesn’t sound quite the same – I think translator Scott Moncrieff did it better with Within a Budding Grove. The second volume has the most beautiful and really untranslatable title A l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs. Combray, which gives its name to the first part of the first volume, is the kind of place you might never want to leave, so if you stop there, you’re still winning. The place and its people are so vivid unsurprisingly, since Combray is modelled on the little town of Illiers, not far from Chartres, where Proust’s father grew up and where Marcel did indeed spend holidays, staying with his aunt and uncle. Slowly the past uncurls its petals and Combray – the scene of all the family’s Easter holidays, with its walks, its river, its shops and its church – is restored to him. The older narrator, who has forgotten everything about his childhood except the trauma of his mother failing to give him a goodnight kiss, dips a shell-shaped Madeleine in a cup of limeflower tea.

In search of lost time complete set