s so huge, and so completely fills her wide-opened mouth that
the muscles of her face are strained and contorted, like a child's who
is filling a balloon with his breath, and that Envy, and we ourselves
for that matter, when we look at her, since all her attention and ours
are concentrated on the action of her lips, have no time, almost, to
spare for envious thoughts.

Despite all the admiration that M. Swann might profess for these figures
of Giotto, it was a long time before I could find any pleasure in seeing
in our schoolroom (where the copies he had brought me were hung) that
Charity devoid of charity, that Envy who looked like nothing so much
as a plate in some medical book, illustrating the compression of the
glottis or uvula by a tumour in the tongue, or by the introduction of
the operator's instrument, a Justice whose greyish and meanly regular
features were the very same as those which adorned the faces of certain
good and pious and slightly withered ladies of Combray whom I used to
see at mass, many of whom had long been enrolled in the reserve forces
of Injustice. But in later years I understood that the arresting
strangeness, the special beauty of these frescoes lay in the great part
played in each of them by its symbols, while the fact that these
were depicted, not as symbols (for the thought symbolised was nowhere
expressed), but as real things, actually felt or materially handled,
added something more precise and more literal to their meaning,
something more concrete and more striking to the lesson they imparted.
And even in the case of the poor kitchen-maid, was not our attention
incessantly drawn to her belly by the load which filled it; and in the
same way, again, are not the thoughts of men and women in the agony of
death often turned towards the practical, painful, obscure, internal,
intestinal aspect, towards that 'seamy side' of death which is, as it
happens, the side that death actually presents to them and forces them
to feel, a side which far more closely resembles a crushing burden, a
difficulty in breathing, a destroying thirst, than the abstract idea to
which we are accustomed to give the name of Death?

There must have been a strong element of reality in those Virtues and
Vices of Padua, since they appeared to me to be as much alive as
the pregnant servant-girl, while she herself appeared scarcely less
allegorical than they. And, quite possibly, this lack (or seeming lack)
of participation