to translate to me the evidence of its contemporary, its inseparable
paramour, the taste of cake soaked in tea; cannot ask it to inform me what
special circumstance is in question, of what period in my past life.

Will it ultimately reach the clear surface of my consciousness, this
memory, this old, dead moment which the magnetism of an identical moment
has travelled so far to importune, to disturb, to raise up out of the very
depths of my being? I cannot tell. Now that I feel nothing, it has
stopped, has perhaps gone down again into its darkness, from which who can
say whether it will ever rise? Ten times over I must essay the task, must
lean down over the abyss. And each time the natural laziness which deters
us from every difficult enterprise, every work of importance, has urged me
to leave the thing alone, to drink my tea and to think merely of the
worries of to-day and of my hopes for to-morrow, which let themselves be
pondered over without effort or distress of mind.

And suddenly the memory returns. The taste was that of the little crumb of
madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I
did not go out before church-time), when I went to say good day to her in
her bedroom, my aunt Leonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own
cup of real or of 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