My Years With Proust - Day 661

   These ideas, tending on the one hand to diminish, and on the other to increase, my regret that I had no gift for literature, were entirely absent from my mind during the long years - in which I had in any case completely renounced the project of writing - which I spent far from Paris receiving treatment in a sanatorium, until there came a time, at the beginning of 1916, when it could no longer get medical staff.  I then returned to a Paris very different from the city to which, as we shall see presently, I had come back once before in August 1914 for a medical consultation, after which I had withdrawn again to my sanatorium.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, p. 743

I'm including this section mainly because it gives us a sense of the flow of time, especially concerning the time that Proust spent in the sanatorium.  It's interesting that he never gives us any details of his life inside the sanatorium.  Instead, he always focuses on life in the outside world, which could reflect his own fascination or a refusal to dwell on his medical condition; a condition that was his greatest rival in his race to finish Remembrance of Things Past.  These were the terrible years of the First World War, and it will play a role as we go forward, although not as much as one might think. During this period Proust informs us that he had "renounced the project of writing."  Again, it's difficult to say whether this is a further expression of the lack of confidence he expressed earlier, or just the strain of his poor health.