Proust's Madeleine

Visitors lining up to see the word “madeleine” as it appeared in Proust’s handwriting for the first time are in for a shock. What appears in a 1910 draft of Swann’s Way is the banal word “biscottes,” easy to spot in the manuscript. Soon Proust will find that this word will yield to another word that will open many doors for him in his narrative. But not yet. It is as though a draft of The Great Gatsby had, at first, a hero called Jones and Daisy was originally called Anne. Or the first draft of The Old Man and the Sea had the old man merely fishing for mackerel. Or that Molly Bloom, at one point in the composition of Ulysses, ended her soliloquy by saying “Maybe.”

 Colm Tóibín writing about a Proust manuscripts exhibition for The New York Review of Books. Worth the visit.