Within a Budding Grove post VI

I have spent today reclaiming a garden from waist high grass and brambles so sadly even after that was finished my aching limbs and numbing tiredness made reading Proust more difficult than usual. Still the aim is to get Volume II finished tomorrow and go onto some Proustian type reading next week while I wait for Volume III to be ordered from the library reserves.

Bullet points between pages 876 - 906

* The narrator is becoming fixated with women and his attention is drawn by a group of girls that seem to hang around together and populate the beach en masse at various times so erratic that it leaves him wasting most of his time waiting for them

* His grandmother is angry by his wasting time on the girls because he has been invited to the studio of Elstir, an artist Swann was very positive about, and she feels he is missing out on the chance to mix with some artistic thinkers and further his mind

* When he finally does visit Elstir's studio sure enough the experience has a powerful impact on him as he looks at the seascapes and appreciates the artists attempts to capture and moment and emotion in a way that photography was starting to do

* Under the sway of the artists enthusiasm all of the negative points the narrator felt about Balbec church, which initially coloured his whole view of the town are challenged and proved to be unfounded

* The girls he had been hoping to see come up and he discovers that the ring leader of them is called Albertine Simonet and she comes from a middle class background not the aristocratic one he had imagined

The last 111 pages beckon tomorrow...