for Easter, and it was indeed surprising that
Francoise allowed her to run so many errands in the town and to do so
much work in the house, for she was beginning to find a difficulty in
bearing before her the mysterious casket, fuller and larger every day,
whose splendid outline could be detected through the folds of her ample
smocks. These last recalled the cloaks in which Giotto shrouds some of
the allegorical figures in his paintings, of which M. Swann had given
me photographs. He it was who pointed out the resemblance, and when he
inquired after the kitchen-maid he would say: "Well, how goes it with
Giotto's Charity?" And indeed the poor girl, whose pregnancy had swelled
and stoutened every part of her, even to her face, and the vertical,
squared outlines of her cheeks, did distinctly suggest those virgins,
so strong and mannish as to seem matrons rather, in whom the Virtues are
personified in the Arena Chapel. And I can see now that those Virtues
and Vices of Padua resembled her in another respect as well. For just as
the figure of this girl had been enlarged by the additional symbol which
she carried in her body, without appearing to understand what it meant,
without any rendering in her facial expression of all its beauty and
spiritual significance, but carried as if it were an ordinary and rather
heavy burden, so it is without any apparent suspicion of what she is
about that the powerfully built housewife who is portrayed in the Arena
beneath the label 'Caritas,' and a reproduction of whose portrait hung
upon the wall of my schoolroom at Combray, incarnates that virtue, for
it seems impossible, that any thought of charity can ever have found
expression in her vulgar and energetic face. By a fine stroke of the
painter's invention she is tumbling all the treasures of the earth at
her feet, but exactly as if she were treading grapes in a wine-press to
extract their juice, or, still more, as if she had climbed on a heap of
sacks to raise herself higher; and she is holding out her flaming heart
to God, or shall we say 'handing' it to Him, exactly as a cook might
hand up a corkscrew through the skylight of her underground kitchen to
some one who had called down to ask her for it from the ground-level
above. The 'Invidia,' again, should have had some look on her face of
envy. But in this fresco, too, the symbol occupies so large a place and
is represented with such realism; the serpent hissing between the lips
of Envy i