Marcel Proust and Madeleines. Just before World War 1, Marcel Proust published ‘Remembrances of Things Past’. The book became an immediate best-seller. In his book, Proust recounted his childhood memories. He had a lot to say about madeleines and he said it in a way that made everybody want them. Before the publication of ‘Remembrances of Things Past’, most people, even in France, had never seen or heard of madeleines before. Madeleines were only made in a few towns in Lorraine, a province in northeastern France. As soon as Proust’s book came out, people all over the world went to bakeries demanding madeleines. Below is a small bit of what Proust had to say about madeleines.
“One day in winter, on my return home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, which I did not ordinarily drink. I declined at first, and then, for no particular reason, changed my mind. She sent for one of those squat, plump little cakes called ‘petites madeleines,’ which look as though they had been molded in the fluted valve of a scallop shell. And soon, mechanically, dispirited after a dreary day with the prospect of a depressing tomorrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the madeleine. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory – this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I sensed that it was connected with the taste of the tea and the madeleine.” – Marcel Proust.
