“How many people, towns, pathways jealousy makes us desperate to know! It is a thirst for knowledge thanks to which we come to have, on a series of isolated points, all possible information except the information we really want. We never know when a suspicion will arise, for suddenly we remember a phrase that was unclear, an alibi which must have been given for a purpose. It is not that we have seen the person again, but there is a jealousy after the event, which arises only after we have left the person in question, a ‘staircase jealousy’ like staircase wit. Perhaps the habit I had developed of keeping certain desires secret within myself, the desire for a young girl of good society like the ones I saw passing under my window followed by their governesses, and particularly the one Saint-Loup, who frequented brothels, had told me about, the desire for pretty lady’s-maids, and particularly Mme Putbus’s, the desire to go to the country in spring and see the hawthornes again, the desire for storms, for Venice, to set to work, to live like other people, perhaps the habit of keeping all these desires alive in me without satisfying them, simply promising myself that I would not forget to realize them one day, perhaps this habit, formed over so many years, of perpetual postponement, of what M. de Charlus damned under the name of procrastination, had become so general in me that it had invaded even my jealous suspicions and led me, while making a mental note that one day I would certainly demand an explanation from Albertine about the young girl (or young girls, for this part of the story was confused, half erased, in other words unreadable in my memory) in whose company Aimé had met her, to delay this demand.”

(Proust, The Prisoner, trans. Carol Clark, p. 75)