Proust
on Madeleines
From
In Remembrances of Things Past
...when one day in winter, on my return home, my mother, seeing
that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did not ordinarily
take. 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 dreay day with the prospect of
a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea
in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the
warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shiver
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 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.
When could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I sensed
that it was connected with the taste of the tea and the cake,
but that it infinitely transcended those savors...
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