previously, would, at the most, have enabled
Swann to say that so-and-so wore a monocle) which, no longer restricted
to the general connotation of a habit, the same in all of them, did not
now strike him with a sense of individuality in each. Perhaps because
he did not regard General de Froberville and the Marquis de Breaute, who
were talking together just inside the door, as anything more than two
figures in a picture, whereas they were the old and useful friends who
had put him up for the Jockey Club and had supported him in duels, the
General's monocle, stuck like a shell-splinter in his common, scarred,
victorious, overbearing face, in the middle of a forehead which it
left half-blinded, like the single-eyed flashing front of the Cyclops,
appeared to Swann as a monstrous wound which it might have been glorious
to receive but which it was certainly not decent to expose, while
that which M. de Breaute wore, as a festive badge, with his pearl-grey
gloves, his crush hat and white tie, substituting it for the familiar
pair of glasses (as Swann himself did) when he went out to places, bore,
glued to its other side, like a specimen prepared on a slide for the
microscope, an infinitesimal gaze that swarmed with friendly feeling and
never ceased to twinkle at the loftiness of ceilings, the delightfulness
of parties, the interestingness of programmes and the excellence of
refreshments.

"Hallo! you here! why, it's ages since I've seen you," the General
greeted Swann and, noticing the look of strain on his face and
concluding that it was perhaps a serious illness that had kept him away,
went on, "You're looking well, old man!" while M. de Breaute turned
with, "My dear fellow, what on earth are you doing here?" to a 'society
novelist' who had just fitted into the angle of eyebrow and cheek his
own monocle, the sole instrument that he used in his psychological
investigations and remorseless analyses of character, and who now
replied, with an air of mystery and importance, rolling the 'r':--"I am
observing!"

The Marquis de Forestelle's monocle was minute and rimless, and, by
enforcing an incessant and painful contraction of the eye over which it
was incrusted like a superfluous cartilage, the presence of which there
was inexplicable and its substance unimaginable, it gave to his face a
melancholy refinement, and led women to suppose him capable of suffering
terribly when in love. But that of M. de Saint-Cande, girdled, like
S