It was a mouthful of miniature sponge-cake dipped in tea that became one of French literature’s most powerful metaphors.



But the madeleine cakes that Marcel Proust made famous as the trigger for nostalgia in his book might have actually started out as toasted bread, according to draft manuscripts to be published in France this week.

A first draft of Proust’s monumental novel dating from 1907 had the author reminiscing not about madeleines as the sensory trigger for a childhood memory about his aunt, but instead about toasted bread mixed with honey.

A second draft, the manuscripts showed, had the evocative mouthful as a biscotto, a hard biscuit.

It was only in the third draft that Proust wrote that he had bitten into a soft little madeleine.

A Paris publishing house, Saint-Peres, showed the shifting food reference in three handwritten manuscripts by Proust that it is to publish in a special three-part notebook set.

The madeleine anecdote is considered one of the key passages in À La Recherche du Temps Perdu or In Search of Lost Time. It is at the heart of the book’s main theme of involuntary memory, in which an experience such as smell or a taste unexpectedly unlocks a past recollection.

Proust is considered one of France’s most influential authors of the 20th century. The expression “Proust’s madeleine” is still used today to refer to a sensory cue that triggers a memory.

“These three never-before-seen notebooks allow one to retrace the literary genealogy of the most emblematic moment of the Proustian universe,” the Saint Pères company said.