MEMOIRE-STACK013

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And suddenly the memory returns. The taste was that of the little crumb of madeleine
which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mronings I did not go out
before church-time), when I went to say good day to her in her bedroom, my aunt
Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of real or lime-flower tea. The
sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it; perhaps
because I had so often seen such things in the interval, without tasting them, on the
trays in pastry-cooks’ windows, that their image had dissociated itself from those
Combray days to take its place among others more recent; perhaps because of those
memories, so long abandoned and put out of mind, nothing now survived, everything
was scattered; the forms of things, including that of the little scallop-shell of pastry, so
richly sensual under its severe, religious folds, were either obliterated or had been so
long dormant as to have lost the power of expansion which would have allowed them
to resume their place in my consciousness. But when from a long-distant past nothing
subsist, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still
alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more insubstantial, more persistent, more
faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to
remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and
bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the endless
structure of recollection.