In Search of Lost Time [volumes 1 to 7]

by Marcel Proust

see me. She had not much time, for she had to go and call for Gisèle with whom she was very anxious to dine. “I know her faults, but she is after all my best friend and the person for whom I feel most affection,” she told me. And she even appeared to feel some alarm at the thought that I might ask her to let me dine with them. She was hungry for people, and a third person who knew her too well, such as myself, would, by preventing her from letting herself go, at once prevent her from enjoying complete satisfaction in their company. The memory of Albertine had become so fragmentary in me that it no longer caused me any sorrow and was no more now than a transition to fresh desires, like a chord which announces a change of key.