1. The madeleine dipped in tea restores Combray in its entirety.
2. The steeples of Martinville suggest a hidden reality.
3. The mouldy smell of the water-closet in the Champs-Élysées reminds Marcel of his Uncle Adophe’s room at Combray.
4. The three trees at Hudimesnil awaken a memory Marcel cannot identify.
5. Flowerless hawthorns at Balbec bring back his childhood.
6. A steam-heater recently installed in Marcel’s bedroom hiccoughs while he is thinking of Doncières and, forever after, the sound is bound up with, or provokes, memories of Doncières.
7. Unbutttoning his boots, the living reality of his grandmother is restored to Marcel long after her death.
8. Twigs burning in his bedroom fire-place recall himself as a boy and bring back memories of Combray and Doncières.
9. The cold weather releases memories of café concerts he used to go to on the first winter evenings and he sings snatches of the popular songs he heard at the time.
10. The smell of petrol reminds him of excursions he took in the country.
11. The rain brings back the scent of lilac, and this memory proliferates into others: the sun’s rays on the balcony remind him of the pigeons in the Champs-Élysées; the muffling of noise on summer mornings in Paris brings back the taste of cherries; the sound of the wind and the return of Easter revive his longing for Brittany and Venice.
12. Tying his scarf, Marcel remembers Albertine.
13. The streets leading to the new Guermantes mansion, in spite of bad paving, bring back the streets Marcel and Françoise used to take to get to the Champs-Élysées.
14. Stumbling on two uneven paving stones in the courtyard of the Guermantes mansion, Marcel recovers his experience of Venice.
15. The noise of the spoon rattling against a plate reminds him of a railway worker on a train the day before who was tapping the wheels with a hammer.
16. A starched white napkin restores Balbec and the sea.
17. The sound of water-pipes at the Guermantes’s brings back the reality of the marine dining-room at Balbec.
18. Opening a copy of François le Champi in the Guermantes’s library, his childhood is restored.
Not all of these memories are involuntary, as Moss pointed out, but many of them are, none more so than the first, the precursor of all the others:
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 (although I did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory made me so happy) 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 (the isolated panel which until that moment had been all that I could see); 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 recognizable, 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 shape and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea. [Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, Volume I]
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