I shuddered, attentive to what I was feeling, something common between the taste of this madeleine I was tasting and that pleasure, isolated from all circumstance, which I had experienced without seeing its cause so soon. It required strength to rise back to the source. I recognized the taste of the piece of madeleine that Aunt Léonie gave me in the morning, after dipping it in her infusion of tea or lime-flower water. Many years had passed since Combray; all that had in the morning surrounded that taste had ceased, all that depended on it had periodically faded, or all that, accumulating, had covered it, so far, so deep. But when from a long-past existence nothing subsists, after the death of beings, after the destruction of things, alone, frailer but more enduring, more immaterial, more faithful, smell and taste remain for a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, upon the ruin of all the rest, bearing without faltering, on their almost impalpable droplet, the immense edifice of memory. And as soon as I had recognized the taste of the piece of madeleine dipped in lime-flower water that my aunt gave me (although I did not yet know, and had to postpone discovering, why this memory made me so happy), immediately the old gray house upon the street, where my bedroom was, came like a stage setting to attach itself to the little pavilion opening onto the garden that had been built for my parents behind it; and with the pavilion came, in that garden, all in the morning, came the summer garden, the rain, the snow, the morning, the evening, the end of an afternoon, the trees, the grass, the earth, the tips of the flowers, the taste of a plum, the towers of Saint-Hilaire, and a thousand other things of my childhood that had for many years been stored in the great warehouse of memory, and that the chance of my cup of tea had made leap forth like a sudden jet of water—all that, one by one, without my being able to stop it, rose up within me from that light of Combray and its surroundings. Then came my sufferings, my desires, my regrets, my joys, like so many chambers whose sweetness I could taste and whose depth I could feel. Little by little, in the hollow of my spoon, there rose, like an apparition, the image of a forgotten reality, and I made an effort to look at it more closely, to ask it to reveal its secrets to me. But I realized that, though I could know nothing else, everything I carried within me, all the trifles of former days, all that I believed lost forever, was reborn within me, with its brilliance, its perfume, its taste, its weight, all that I had unknowingly kept. And just as the Japanese amuse themselves by dipping into a bowl of water a piece of paper which, unfolding there in an instant, takes on color, takes on design, takes on shape, becomes a flower, a house, birds, figures, I felt spring up within me, in my heart, in my thought, all those things of the past that surrounded me, alive, fragile, delicate, my days at Combray. Then memory, which no voluntary effort of thought could bring back, found by itself, alone, through the involuntary path of the senses, what it had lost. And before my eyes there was reborn, uncertain, dimmed by the veil of years, but living, the little town where I spent my childhood holidays, with its streets, its houses, its church, its gardens, and, dominating all, the spire of the church of Saint-Hilaire, which has made me dream so much, made me think so much, that I believe still, today, that it is what made me what I am. All the truth of the past, the existence of what we have experienced, which we believed lost forever, is given back to us by taste and by smell; and it is in vain that we seek to remember it otherwise: the roads of memory through the eyes are less deep than those that pass through flavors and scents, which are all that, in the world, can be best grasped and longest kept. For of all that we have loved, seen, felt, heard, it is not thought that keeps the trace, it is not memory, it is the senses, and they keep everything, without our knowing it, in the smallest taste, in the smallest perfume, until the day when, met again by chance, they give back to us, all at once, the immense treasure of the past, everything we believed we had left behind us forever, and which, from the depths of oblivion, reappears, intact, living, and fills us with happiness.