For many years now, everything in Combray that was not the theater and the drama of my going to bed had ceased to exist for me, when one winter day, as I came home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, suggested I have, against my usual habit, a cup of tea. I refused at first and, I do not know why, changed my mind. She sent for one of those short, 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, weighed down by the gloomy day and the prospect of a sad morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had let soften a piece of madeleine. But at the very instant when the sip mixed with the cake crumbs touched my palate, I quivered, attentive to the extraordinary thing that was happening inside me. A delicious pleasure had invaded me, isolated, detached from any notion of its cause. It had immediately made the vicissitudes of life indifferent to me, its disasters harmless, its brevity illusory, acting in the same way as love, by filling me with a precious essence: or rather this essence was not in me, it was me. I had ceased to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Whence could this powerful joy have come to me? I sensed that it was connected to the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it infinitely surpassed it, and could not be of the same nature. Where did it come from? What did it mean? Where could one grasp it? I drink a second sip, in which I find nothing more than in the first, a third, which brings me a little less than the second. It is time I stopped; the virtue of the beverage seems to be diminishing. It is clear that the truth I am seeking is not in it, but in me. It has awakened it there, but does not know it, and can only repeat indefinitely, with less and less force, this same testimony which I do not know how to interpret and which I want at least to be able to ask of it again and find intact, at my disposal, presently, for a decisive clarification. I put down the cup and turn toward my mind. It is for it to find the truth. But how? A grave uncertainty, every time the mind feels itself surpassed by itself; when it, the seeker, is at once the dark country where it must search and where all its baggage will be of no use to it. Search? Not only that: create. It is face to face with something that does not yet exist and which it alone can realize, then bring into its light. And I begin again to ask myself what this unknown state could have been, which brought no logical proof, but the evidence of its bliss, of its reality, before which the others vanished. I want to try to make it reappear. I go back in thought to the moment when I took the first spoonful of tea. I find the same state again, without any new clarity. I ask my mind for one more effort, to bring back once more the fleeing sensation. And, so that nothing may break the impetus with which it is about to try to recapture it, I push aside every obstacle, every extraneous idea, I shield my ears and my attention from the noises of the neighboring room. But feeling my mind tiring without succeeding, I force it on the contrary to take that distraction I was refusing it, to think of something else, to recover before a supreme attempt. Then a second time, I clear the space before it, I place back in front of it the still recent flavor of that first sip, and I feel something shudder within me that is shifting, that would like to rise, something that has been unanchored at a great depth; I do not know what it is, but it rises slowly; I feel the resistance and I hear the murmur of the distances traversed. Surely, what is thus throbbing at the bottom of me must be the image, the visual memory, which, linked to this flavor, tries to follow it up to me. But it struggles too far away, too confusedly; scarcely do I perceive the neutral reflection in which the elusive whirlpool of stirred colors blends; but I cannot distinguish the form, nor ask it, as the only possible interpreter, to translate for me the testimony of its contemporary, of its inseparable companion, the flavor, nor ask it to teach me what particular circumstance, what time of the past is in question. Will it ever reach the surface of my clear consciousness, this memory, the ancient moment which the attraction of an identical moment has come from so far away to summon, stir, and lift from the very depths of me? I do not know. Now I feel nothing more, it has stopped, slipped back down perhaps; who knows if it will ever rise again from its darkness? Ten times I must begin again, bend down toward it. And each time the cowardice that turns us away from any difficult task, from any important work, advised me to leave the matter alone, to drink my tea while thinking simply of my troubles of today, of my desires for tomorrow, which can be chewed over without effort. And all at once the memory appeared to me. This taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on that day I did not go out before mass time), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to offer me after dipping it in her infusion of tea or lime-blossom. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to me before I tasted it; perhaps because, having often seen them since, without eating them, on the shelves of pastry cooks, their image had left those Combray days to link up with others more recent; perhaps because, of those memories long abandoned outside memory, nothing survived, everything had disintegrated; the shapes, and that of the pastry shell too, so fatly sensual under its severe and devout pleating, had been abolished, or, slumbering, had lost the expansive force that would have allowed them to rejoin consciousness. But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, awaiting, hoping, upon the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.