followed by a servant with a pallid countenance and
a small pigtail clubbed at the back of his head, like one of Goya's
sacristans or a tabellion in an old play, Swann passed by an office in
which the lackeys, seated like notaries before their massive registers,
rose solemnly to their feet and inscribed his name. He next crossed a
little hall which--just as certain rooms are arranged by their owners
to serve as the setting for a single work of art (from which they
take their name), and, in their studied bareness, contain nothing else
besides--displayed to him as he entered it, like some priceless effigy
by Benvenuto Cellini of an armed watchman, a young footman, his body
slightly bent forward, rearing above his crimson gorget an even more
crimson face, from which seemed to burst forth torrents of fire,
timidity and zeal, who, as he pierced the Aubusson tapestries that
screened the door of the room in which the music was being given with
his impetuous, vigilant, desperate gaze, appeared, with a soldierly
impassibility or a supernatural faith--an allegory of alarums,
incarnation of alertness, commemoration of a riot--to be looking out,
angel or sentinel, from the tower of dungeon or cathedral, for the
approach of the enemy or for the hour of Judgment. Swann had now only to
enter the concert-room, the doors of which were thrown open to him by an
usher loaded with chains, who bowed low before him as though tendering
to him the keys of a conquered city. But he thought of the house
in which at that very moment he might have been, if Odette had but
permitted, and the remembered glimpse of an empty milk-can upon a
door-mat wrung his heart.

He speedily recovered his sense of the general ugliness of the human
male when, on the other side of the tapestry curtain, the spectacle of
the servants gave place to that of the guests. But even this ugliness of
faces, which of course were mostly familiar to him, seemed something new
and uncanny, now that their features,--instead of being to him symbols
of practical utility in the identification of this or that man, who
until then had represented merely so many pleasures to be sought after,
boredoms to be avoided, or courtesies to be acknowledged--were at rest,
measurable by aesthetic co-ordinates alone, in the autonomy of their
curves and angles. And in these men, in the thick of whom Swann now
found himself packed, there was nothing (even to the monocle which many
of them wore, and which,