Swann's Way

affection for Odette still preserved the form which had been imposed on
it, from the beginning, by his ignorance of the occupations in which she
passed her days, as well as by the mental lethargy which prevented him
from supplementing that ignorance by imagination. He was not jealous, at
first, of the whole of Odette's life, but of those moments only in which
an incident, which he had perhaps misinterpreted, had led him to suppose
that Odette might have played him false. His jealousy, like an octopus
which throws out a first, then a second, and finally a third tentacle,
fastened itself irremovably first to that moment, five o'clock in
the afternoon, then to another, then to another again. But Swann was
incapable of inventing his sufferings. They were only the memory, the
perpetuation of a suffering that had come to him from without.

From without, however, everything brought him fresh suffering. He
decided to separate Odette from Forcheville, by taking her away for a
few days to the south. But he imagined that she was coveted by every
male person in the hotel, and that she coveted them in return. And so
he, who, in old days, when he travelled, used always to seek out new