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quired 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 man-
nish 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, with-
out any rendering in her facial expression of all its beauty
and spiritual significance, but carried as if it were an ordi-
nary 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 vir-
tue, 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 un-
derground kitchen to some one who had called down to ask
her for it from the ground-level above. The ‘Invidia,’ again,

122 Swann’s Way