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interest Louise took in the house. Confident I knew everything of importance about Proust, I’d refused the sheaf of documentation offered by the gardienne , but she’d accepted one. She referred to it as we walked around, quoting what Proust wrote about the wallpaper, a painting, the orangerie, no bigger than one of the bedrooms, at the bottom of the small garden. Louise had grown up with Proust and “done” him at school. As part of her patrimoine —her cultural heritage—he was worthy of respect, like Balzac, Zola, Gide.
    My appreciation was different. I was a fan. For me, the visit was sacramental, akin to taking the waters at Lourdes. It was enough for me to sniff the air, smell the dust, stand in the little garden and look up at the windows through which he’d gazed a century and a half ago. He had been here .

    In Proust’s kitchen

    The monument at Illiers, with pigeon

    Louise
    Just as we stepped out onto the street again, the blind in the window of the patisserie rattled up and a girl turned the sign on the door from “ Fermé ” to “ Ouvert .”
    They sold madeleines—not as Tante Léonie had bought them but prepacked in polythene. We bought half a dozen bags—gifts for the family, souvenirs. I waited until we got on the train before I opened one and took a nibble. If I expected the same revelation as Proust, I was disappointed. Not bad but a bit dry. And, I suspected, made with plain flour, with no powdered almonds. Maybe with some lime-flower tea . . .
    I held out the bag to Louise, curled up again with her coat, half asleep.
    “Want one?”
    She opened one eye. “No, thanks. I’m on a diet.”
    She started to nod off again, then thought of something.
    “By the way, did you know it wasn’t originally a madeleine he dipped in the tea?”
    “Not a madeleine? Of course it was a madeleine!” I reached for my Kindle and proof.
    “In the book, he made it a madeleine,” she said, “but in Contre Saint-Beuve he describes what really happened.”
    She shuffled the papers given her at the house and read out a passage from Proust’s earlier book, regarded as a dry run for his masterpiece.
The other night, when I came in, frozen from the snow, and not having got warm again, since I was writing by lamplight in my bedroom, my old cook suggested making me a cup of tea, which I never drink. And by chance, she brought with it some slices of pain grillé. I dipped the pain grillé into the cup of tea, and the moment I put it in my mouth I had the sensation of smelling geraniums, orange blossom, and a sensation of extraordinary light, of happiness.
    “ Pain grillé ? Proust’s madeleine was . . . a piece of toast?”
    “Apparently.” She saw my disappointment. “The idea’s the same.”
    “Yes. I suppose so.”
    But a small light had just gone out. Once again, Proust was proved right. Nothing lasted. Though time could be briefly retrieved in memory, it inevitably passed. And if the instant of insight can change one’s life, another instant can change it back.
    At the end of Du côté de chez Swann , the narrator tries to retrieve memories of Swann and his wife by returning to the streets where they once lived. But though the buildings and the people look more or less the same, time has changed both them and the older Proust who observes them.
The reality that I had known no longer existed. It sufficed that Mme. Swann did not appear, in the same attire and at the same moment, for the whole avenue to be altered. The places that we have known belong now only to the little world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment, and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.
    Oh, well—as Marie-Antoinette might have said, “Let them eat toast.”

Seven
    First Catch Your Fungus
The