The sixth volume deals with the aftermath of a sudden break in the narrator's relationship with Albertine. He is left to cope with loss, and the book follows the slow, uneven course of grief, memory and forgetting, as feelings he thought permanent change shape. He travels to Venice with his mother, and later renews contact with old acquaintances, including Gilberte. It is a quiet, reflective volume about how love survives in the mind and how time wears it away. It appeared posthumously, and exists in more than one version.