La Madeleine de Proust

Wednesday, January 15, 2020:

Today I started my French class at the Institut francais du Royaume-Uni in South Kensington.  The class will meet every Wednesday for three hours, for ten weeks.  There are nine students in my class, all of whom are older adults except for one young woman from the Ukraine.  There are even a few students older than myself.  The textbook we are using is titled "Defi," which translates into "challenge."

I have already started doing the exercises in the workbook.  The first exercise has to do with La Madeleine de Proust.  Marcel Proust was a French writer from the 20th century who wrote In Search of Lost Time (or Remembrance of Things Past), a book which deals with the subject of memory. In perhaps the book's most famous passage, he recalls how a madeleine cookie evokes a childhood visit to his aunt in a village.   The workbook asks us to consider: Quelles sont vos madeleines de Proust?  What are your madeleines of Proust?  What are the things that through taste, hearing, touch, sight, odor and emotions evoke certain places, people and events in your life?  To answer this question, I chose an old knitted bag squirreled away in a closet of our house in San Francisco.

Ma mère avait un sac tricoté plein de vieux boutons. C'était un sac curieux, en lambeaux mais conservant toujours une qualité grandeur. J'aimais mettre ma main dans le sac et sentir les boutons enfouis à l'intérieur. Certains étaient lisses, d'autres non; certains étaient grands, certains étaient petits. Il y avait de petits "mother of pearl" boutons que ma mère utilisait sur nos chandails d'école catholique. Et il y avait des boutons ostentatoires que je n'aurais jamais imaginés porter dans ma famille. Il y avait des boutons plats et des "shank," des boutons en métal et des boutons en plastique, des boutons en tissu et toutes sortes de boutons intéressantes qui m'ont intrigué et ravi. Lorsque je tenais un tas de boutons dans ma main ils ressemblaient à des bijoux, comme si leur seule fonction était d'éblouir.

My mother had a knitted bag full of old buttons. It was a curious bag, tattered but still retaining an undeniable grandeur. I liked putting my hand in the bag and feeling the buttons buried inside. Some were smooth, some not; some were large, some were small. There were small standard mother-of-pearl buttons that my mother used on our Catholic school sweaters. And there were ostentatious buttons that I never imagined anyone in my family ever wearing.  There were flat buttons and shank buttons, metal buttons and plastic buttons, fabric buttons and all kinds of interesting buttons that intrigued and delighted me. When I held a bunch of buttons in my hand they seemed like jewels, as if their only function was to dazzle.

I think I am going to like this French class a lot.   I feel ready for "un grand defi."