" Yet the letter was not addressed to my mistress, but to another person in the building whose name was different but had been mistaken for hers. The letter was written not in a coded format but in poor French, because it had been written by an American lady, who was indeed one of Saint-Loup’s friends, as he informed me himself. And the strange way in which this American lady formed some of her letters had given the appearance of a nickname to a perfectly authentic but foreign surname. I had therefore been entirely wrong in my suspicions that day. But the intellectual framework that had linked these facts together in my mind did provide a perfectly correct and unanswerable model for the truth when my mistress (who at the time had been thinking of spending her whole life with me) did leave me three months later, for it happened in a fashion absolutely identical to the way I had imagined on the previous occasion. "

― Marcel Proust , La fugitiva