"We have such numerous interests in our lives that it is not uncommon, on a single occasion, for the foundations of a happiness that does not yet exist to be laid down alongside the intensification of a grief from which we are still suffering."

As a young child, the narrator is a sensitive child that has trouble sleeping. He would stay awake, afraid of the dark, until his mother came to his room to give him a kiss goodnight. One evening his parents are entertaining a friend, and the child stays awake until the guest leaves, unable to sleep without his mother's comfort. Later on in life, the narrator meets Charles Swann, the visitor from that momentous night. Told through a series of flashbacks, the story of Swann's marriage to the faithless Odette is closely tied to the narrator's memories of the French countryside.

The first volume in the modernist masterpiece In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust's delicate exploration of involuntary memory and the role it plays in forming our sense of self was inspired by the Impressionism of Claude Monet.

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