Remembrance of Things Past is composed of seven volumes, all related and depending on the initial idea of the search for remembrance and revitalization of things past. With the exception of the last volume, The Past Recaptured (1931; Le Temps retrouve, 1927), they are less known and read than the first volume, Swann's Way. The theme of the two ways, Swann's way, and Guermantes' way, which appeared in the first volume, represented in the child's imagination the two roads leading from the family home, as irreconcilable as east and west, and will be repeated in the succeeding volumes. The two ways will finally be reconciled in the last volume, when Gilberte Swann marries Robert de Saint-Loup.

Within a Budding Grove, (1919; 1924), Part II of the novel, which Proust reworked for six years after the publication of Swann's Way, is longer and more complex, and corresponds roughly to the narrator's...