Swann's Way

Forcheville. Often for several days on end the suspicion that she was
in love with some one else would distract his mind from the question
of Forcheville, making it almost immaterial to him, like those new
developments of a continuous state of ill-health which seem for a little
time to have delivered us from their predecessors. There were even
days when he was not tormented by any suspicion. He fancied that he was
cured. But next morning, when he awoke, he felt in the same place
the same pain, a sensation which, the day before, he had, as it were,
diluted in the torrent of different impressions. But it had not stirred
from its place. Indeed, it was the sharpness of this pain that had
awakened him.

Since Odette never gave him any information as to those vastly important
matters which took up so much of her time every day (albeit he had lived
long enough in the world to know that such matters are never anything
else than pleasures) he could not sustain for any length of time the
effort to imagine them; his brain would become a void; then he would
pass a finger over his tired eyelids, in the same way as he might have
wiped his eyeglass, and would cease altogether to think. There