What if Proust’s ‘madeleine’ had stayed…

What if Proust’s ‘madeleine’ had turned out to be… stale bread!? 🤯 Here is the oldest known version to date of what would become the famous ‘madeleine’ episode in ‘Combray’, the first part of “Swann's Way”:

🖋️ “Often, when I’ve read one of those legends – of which there are so many in Brittany – where it is believed that the souls of the dead pass into familiar objects and remain trapped there until the day someone who knew them comes along and sets them free, I have felt that this was a belief I would not need much effort to accept. This is because every time great things in my life have died – or at least when I have believed them to be dead – they have in reality passed into very small things and remained dead there indeed, unless I came across those small things. I tried with all my intellect to conjure them up, but I could not manage it. ‘Alas,’ I would say to myself, ‘that whole part of my past is dead.’ How could I have known that all those summers, the garden where I spent them, the sorrows I experienced there, the sky above, and the whole life of my family—all of that had been transformed into a small cup of scalding tea in which stale bread was soaked. Had I never come across that cup of scalding tea — and that might very well have happened, as I’m not in the habit of drinking it — it is likely that that year, that garden and those sorrows would never have come back to life for me.”

This text is one of the manuscripts accompanying the “Seventy-five pages” 📔 published in 2021 by @editions_gallimard: Proust probably wrote it between January and October 1908. The novel was finally published on 14 November 1913. 🌟

You will have noticed, as I have, that it all begins in Brittany 😇 with the theory of metempsychosis (the transmigration of souls after death), which James Joyce also refers to in his novel “Ulysses”, published in 1922, the year of Proust’s death.

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