Talk:evoke

Hello, in french
if somebody (usually having a more than basic level of french culture, though) says to you : »Oh, c'était une vraie madeleine... » (« Oh,it was just so like a madeleine for me... ») , you'll understand he is hinting at the fact that some far-away haunting remembrance has been evoked to him by a smell, a word, a sound, a music.

The expression stems from Marcel Proust's 1913 book "Du côté de chez Swann" ("Swann's way"), 1st book of his masterpiece work »A la recherche du temps perdu »  ("In search of lost time"). Proust describes here his first experience of involuntary memory : how, many years later, the taste of a bit of "madeleine" (a spungy shell-shaped yellow little cake) dipped into a spoonful of linden-flowers tea, irresistibly evoked back in his mind his happy childhood... T.y. Arapaima 06:33, 11 May 2010 (UTC)