Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The words petite madeleine refer to the petite madeleine of Proust, an author whom Madeleine Castaing was especially interested; she spent decades reading In Search of Lost Time again and again, fully, several times. She had discovered this work in 1913. Generally speaking, the Castaings were patrons of artists belonging to the École de Paris and to the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. Madeleine Castaing was a friend of Erik Satie, Maurice Sachs, Blaise Cendrars, André Derain, Jean Cocteau (arranging his house in Milly-la-Forêt), Marc Chagall, Iché, Picasso, Henry Miller, Louise de Vilmorin (to whom she inspired the character of Julietta in the novel of the same name), and Francine Weisweiller (for whom she decorated the Villa Santo Sospir in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat). In the 1970s, she helped François-Marie Banier by purchasing a dozen of his photographs for 70,000 francs. The historian and politician Michel Castaing (1918–2004), the Castaings' younger son, was a famous expert in paleography. Michel's son, Frédéric Castaing, is a specialist in autographs and also a novelist. When Michel Castaing died in 2004, the family mansion in Lèves was sold at auction by Sotheby's, as well as the family collection of paintings and art objects, including seven paintings by Soutine. Count Bruno de Caumont, artistic director at Edmond Petit, the company who edits Madeleine Castaing’s fabrics, and an expert of her style, arranged the items to be sold into decoration scenes . Bibliography Books (prefaces by Jacques Grange and Frédéric Castaing) Pierre Levallois et al., La Décoration (5e volume de la collection « Connaissance des Arts », 1963, p. 60) Jean-Noël Liaut, Madeleine Castaing, Mécène à Montparnasse, décoratrice à Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Payot, 2008 Lisa Lovett-Smith, Paris Interiors, Taschen Patrick Mauriès et Christian Lacroix, Styles d'aujourd'hui, Gallimard/Le Promeneur, 1995 Barbara et René Stoeltie, Chez Elles : le décor au féminin, Flammarion, 2003, pp. 13 à 19 Suzanne Trocmé, Influential Interiors, Michtell Beazley, 1999 Adam Lewis, The Great Lady Decorators: The Women Who Defined Interior Design, 1870-1955, Rizzoli, New York, 2010 Reviews Hervé Joubeaux et Pierre Falicon, Le Temps retrouvé chez Madeleine Castaing, photographies de Claire Flanders, musée des Beaux-Arts, Chartres, 1997 Hervé Leroux, « L'appartement de Madeleine Castaing », Maison française n° 509, 2000 Anne de Royère, « Madeleine Castaing, Lla Mujer de los azules », Casas e Gente, septembre 2004 Barbara Stoeltie, « Au revoir, Lèves », photographs by René Stoeltie, The World