Page 123 - swanns-way

should have had some look on her face of envy. But in this
fresco, too, the symbol occupies so large a place and is rep-
resented with such realism; the serpent hissing between the
lips of Envy is 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 mat-
ter, 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 sym-
bols (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,

123