Samenvatting

The work of Marcel Proust, the famous novelist of the twentieth century, is often associated with a recall of long-forgotten sensations aroused by typically French delicacies, the 'madeleines'. However, it is not just a case of vivid remembrance. In Sodom et Gomorrhe, part IV of his masterwork A la recherche du temps perdu, Proust states that "reality does not exist as long as she is not re-created by our thoughts. [It is] the earliest feelings attempting to combine with the other more recent feeling, and melt together to form one element, with the result that the calendar of facts so often fails to coincide with the calendar of feelings."