His Remembrance of things past

For a long time I used to go to bed early. Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say I'm going to sleep. And half an hour later the thought that it was time to go to sleep would awaken me; I would try to put away the book which, I imagined, was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; I had been thinking all the time, while I was asleep, of what I had just been reading, but my thoughts had run into a channel of their own, until I myself seemed actually to have become the subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between Francois I and Charles V.

Quinto volumen de En busca del tiempo perdido, en el que el narrador se detiene en el amor convertido en obsesión, en la naturaleza de los celos y del sufrimiento amoroso. Albertine, segundo gran amor del protagonista, es un ser de rostro siempre cambiante, lleno de encanto y seducción, pero fuente inagotable de incógnitas y contradicciones. Marcel conduce ahora a Albertine a París y en compañía de sus criados viven como amantes. Pero sólo los celos conservan vivo su amor, que es frío e indiferente, cuando no aparece la sospecha. La certeza de que le abandonará y recobrará su libertad, comienza a invadir a Marcel, cada vez que presiente las mentiras de Albertine, que con sus vicios le atormenta.

Paris during the German air-raids of World War I and an epilogue in which the author's ideas and feelings are expressed.