Proust’s Within a Budding Grove [aka In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower] is sometimes remembered for young Marcel’s picnics on the bluffs at Balbec, a fictional town in Normandy. (Proust does not use pique-nique because this is an outdoor meal.)
With a “little band” of teenage friends, Albertine, Andrée, Delphine, and Rosemonde, Marcel sat on the grass, enjoying the view of the sea, chat ting and lunching. The girls’ lunches are unspecified, but Marcel volunteers that he does not like cheese sandwiches. *Instead, he eats chocolate cream cake with sugar icing and apricot tarts. At these picnics, Marcel begins a long relationship with Albertine, then sixteen, which eventually proves a heartbreaker for him.
Proust’s aunt’s home in Illiers, the town he fictionalized as Combray, was probably where the picnic was. It’s a posed snapshot of the family looking directly at the photographer, pleasantly engaged and even mugging. In a summery straw hat, Proust stands at the center, smiling and, if no one notices, holding a pear in his hand that his mother reaches up to take without looking. Counting the three (empty?) wine bottles is easy, but the rest of the food is difficult to identify.
The picnic in Harold Pinter’s screenplay for Remembrance of Things Past (1972) follows Proust’s narrative, including the reference to chocolate cake. Pinter’s stage production (2000) shifts and focuses the girls’ chatter leaving Marcel odd-man-out. Their camaraderie perturbs Marcel, who suspects them of being lesbians.
*Croque-Monsieur (“crunchy-mister”) is a sandwich of ham, Emmenthal, or Gruyere cheese, on grilled or toasted bread. It’s the first mention of that familiar sandwich though it had only been introduced in Parisian restaurants a decade before.
Featured Image: Proust is standing center wearing straw hat.
See Marcel Proust. Within A Budding Grove [À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur] (1914). Translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff, http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300401.txt; Peter Quennell, ed. Marcel Proust:1871-1922, Centennial Volume. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971; Shirley King. Dining with Marcel Proust: A Practical Guide to French Cuisine of the Belle Epoque. Lincoln, Nebraska: Bison Books, 1979. Reprint, 2006; Ann Borrel, Alain Sendrens, and Jean-Bernard Naudin. Dining with Proust. New York: Random House, 1992; Harold Pinter, Joseph Losey, and Barbara Bray. Remembrance of Things Past (1972). New York: Grove Press, 2000; Harold Pinter. Remembrance of Things Past. Adapted by Harold Pinter and Di Trevis from Harold Pinter’s The Proust Screenplay based on Proust’s novel (1914). London: Faber and Faber, 2000