The passage in ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’ in which Marcel Proust describes the moment of biting a piece of a madeleine and consequently remembering colours, forms, smells and visions from a far away childhood, became one of the most quoted, referred to and adapted moments in European literary history. The work ‘A replica of Marcel Proust’s Original Madeleine’ is featuring an actual madeleine which is sealed and presented in a luxurious glass bell, treated as a valuable museal object. Inaccessible for anyone to touch, smell or taste, the piece doesn’t hold any pragmatic function and remains a mere poetic manifestation of the power of an object to evoke past experiences and tell personal stories. As such, it invites the public to reconsider the different functions that replicas of supposedly valuable artefacts posses, all the more when an actual original artefact has never really existed or had any significant meaning.