Il s’agissait, pour \u00eatre concret, de la lecture de “Robin des Bois”, \u00e0 l\u2019\u00e2ge de 7 ou 8 ans, dans la maison des grands-parents, durant les vacances d’\u00e9t\u00e9 pr\u00e8s de la mer\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/volkanartz.chauss.in\/app\/uploads\/2024\/09\/image-51.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nCela est d\u2019autant plus croustillant que cette situation s’est produite quelques pages seulement avant le fameux passage des \u00ab madeleines \u00bb.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Pour celles et ceux qui ne l\u2019ont pas encore lu, il s\u2019agit de souvenirs (au moins en partie autobiographiques) au cours desquels le narrateur se rappelle un \u00e9v\u00e9nement, \u00e0 la fois clair (par les sens) et confus (au niveau du souvenir conscient) : alors qu’il \u00e9tait enfant et qu’un soir le trouvait froid et presque glac\u00e9, sa ch\u00e8re maman lui offrit une madeleine, \u00e0 tremper dans une tasse de th\u00e9, pour le r\u00e9chauffer.
A peine un morceau de cette p\u00e2tisserie en bouche, un \u00e9clair fulgurant le saisit. Alors qu’il ne comprend gu\u00e8re ce qui lui arrive, quelques bouch\u00e9es renouvel\u00e9es et une plong\u00e9e r\u00e9flective dans son pass\u00e9 finissent par le convaincre qu’il s’agit d’une r\u00e9sonance m\u00e9morielle. Ce go\u00fbt si particulier renvoie en effet notre narrateur \u00e0 un souvenir plus ancien : alors qu\u2019il visitait sa tante, celle-ci lui offrait aussi une madeleine tremp\u00e9e dans sa tasse de th\u00e9.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mais je vous laisse appr\u00e9cier la prose de Marcel Proust, ci-apr\u00e8s, dont j’ai malheureusement d\u00fb r\u00e9duire la longueur, pour les besoins du billet de ce jour (mais vous trouverez un lien vers le texte complet en fin de page) :<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect [...]<\/em> “Du c\u00f4t\u00e9 de chez Swan”, extrait, chapitre 1. Marcel Proust, 1913.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n The evocation takes us back into another time, place and feel, a moment which is still alive, deep inside us. That's how it goes, with tastes and scents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These senses are relatively less valorized in our modern (western) world, more focusing on let's say the eye and the ear (not to talk about the mind, which isn't a sense, but still over used). It might explain why these senses have acquired, thanks to their practical \"uselessness\", a real power : to disconnect from mind control and to carry a capacity of unconscious evocation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is truly fascinating ! Yes, when a simple smell, or a flavor, takes us back into remembrance, it feels so nice ! As they say, French people, while sitting at the table in front of a nice roasted chicken, are quite prone to talk vividly about another chicken, which they happened to enjoy in the past. Isn't it strange ?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cr\u00e9dit : Henri Roger, “Repas de famille”, 1890<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Usually, these remembrances are rather simple. Rappelons- nous de ce sommet dramatique, l\u2019acm\u00e9 comme on dit, du film d\u2019animation “Ratatouille”, au cours duquel le petit rat cuisinier d\u00e9cide de pr\u00e9parer au sinistre critique\u2026 une ratatouille ! Souvenir de son enfance, ce plat si simple que lui pr\u00e9parait sa maman, le ram\u00e8ne d\u2019un seul coup l\u00e0 bas, et contribue \u00e0 le transformer.
Many years had elapsed during which nothing of Combray, save what was comprised in the theatre and the drama of my going to bed there, had any existence for me, when one day in winter, as I came home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did not ordinarily take. I declined at first, and then, for no particular reason, changed my mind. She sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called 'petites madeleines,' which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim's shell. And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. [\u2026] Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I was conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature as theirs. Whence did it come? What did it signify? How could I seize upon and define it?\nI drink a second mouthful, in which I find nothing more than in the first, a third, which gives me rather less than the second. It is time to stop; the potion is losing its magic. It is plain that the object of my quest, the truth, lies not in the cup but in myself. [\u2026]<\/em>
Undoubtedly what is thus palpitating in the depths of my being must be the image, the visual memory which, being linked to that taste, has tried to follow it into my conscious mind. But its struggles are too far off, too much confused; scarcely can I perceive the colourless reflection in which are blended the uncapturable whirling medley of radiant hues [\u2026]<\/em>
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 L\u00e9onie 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 them to resume their place in my consciousness.<\/em>
[\u2026]<\/em>
And once I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-flowers which my aunt used to give me [\u2026], immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theatre to attach itself to the little pavilion, opening on to the garden, which had been built out behind it for my parents [\u2026] ; and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square where I was sent before luncheon, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine. And just as the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little crumbs of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch themselves and bend, take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, permanent and recognisable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/volkanartz.chauss.in\/app\/uploads\/2024\/09\/image-47.png\")
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It seems so surprising - doesn't it ? - that we'd like it to happen over and over, in a surge for nostalgia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Pour en revenir \u00e0 cet exemple tout personnel, en “respirant” ce livre, cette odeur de papier me renvoyait d’un seul coup dans cette chambre, o\u00f9 j\u2019essayais, alors, de tuer le temps (bien long) de la sieste qui m\u2019\u00e9tait impos\u00e9e. Au hasard de mes fouilles, dans la biblioth\u00e8que d\u00e9su\u00e8te des grands parents, j\u2019\u00e9tais tomb\u00e9 sur cette version abr\u00e9g\u00e9e de Robin des Bois, imprim\u00e9e dans les ann\u00e9es 50.
I still see the cover and could probably feel its touch under the hand. But it's also the whole place that comes back to me, alive, with its atmosphere : the dark room, obscured by wooden shutters ; the muffled sounds from the outdoors, the squeaking door that someone tries to open discretely. And I still smell the heady scent of the fig tree\u2026 which actually never gave us any fruit at the time we were there !<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/volkanartz.chauss.in\/app\/uploads\/2024\/09\/image-48.png\")
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Parfois, m\u00eame, ils ne sont m\u00eame pas teint\u00e9s de joie particuli\u00e8re, mais juste d’enfance, et leur \u00e9vocation suffit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Once again, a madeleine ! (and a great emotional and artistic piece)<\/p>\n\n\n\n