Marcel Proust's madeleine taught the world about memory

Person: Marcel Proust
Lived: 1871–1922
Field: Literature
From: French

The story

Marcel Proust spent long childhood holidays in Illiers, a country town, and at his great-uncle's house in Auteuil. Together they became the model for Combray, the fictional town at the heart of his novel In Search of Lost Time, which he began shaping in 1909 and which was published in seven volumes between 1913 and 1927.

The book is famous for its theme of involuntary memory: recollections that come back unbidden, triggered by the senses rather than by conscious effort. The idea is introduced early in the first volume, Swann's Way, published in 1913. Until that moment, the narrator explains, his memory of Combray had been limited to a few fragments, above all the evenings when he waited anxiously for his mother as a child.

Then, as an adult, he tastes a piece of madeleine cake dipped in tea and is overwhelmed by a sensation so powerful that he asks where it could have come from. After a long effort he realises that the taste is the same as the madeleine his aunt Léonie used to give him, dipped in her tea, on Sunday mornings in Combray. With it the whole world of his childhood returns: the house, the town, its people and gardens.

Throughout the novel, similar moments triggered by sights, sounds and smells bring back important memories. In the final volume, Time Regained, published in 1927, a flashback like the one caused by the madeleine, set off by uneven paving stones at the Guermantes house, begins the resolution of the story and leads the narrator to decide to write his book.

The passage became one of the most famous in modern literature, a touchstone for anyone who has found a smell or taste carrying them back to childhood. Illiers itself took the name Illiers-Combray in 1971 to mark the centenary of Proust's birth, in homage to the novel.