You can buy this madeleine for a buck at All City Coffee, Pioneer Square.
The main reason why madeleine’s are easy to find in Seattle is Remembrance of Things Past. A bite of the petite sweet opens one of the longest and greatest novels of the 20th century.
She sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called petites madeleines, which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim’s shell. And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place…I bought and brought the madeleine to the office and had Jen Graves eat it, as I permit nothing except coffee to enter my stomach in the morning.
Jen took a bite but was not inspired to write a very long novel about how she became herself, an art critic. She was even not happy to bite the madeleine. It seemed like a waste of time to her. Indeed, the world of the madeleine has left us for good. Like some temple artifact that has survived its age of meaning at the total price of its religious power, the madeleine has survived its age at the sad price of persisting in a world that is dead to the novel.
I agree Gibbon got in wrong on Christianity, superb writer though he was. One minor quibble with the thrust of your argument, however: Gibbon died in the 18th century. Nietzsche was born in the 19th.
It would’ve taken quite some doing for Gibbon to steal from a man who was yet to be born.