My Year With Proust - Day 14

"Despite the admiration that M. Swann might professor 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 play in each of them by its symbols, while the fact that these were depicted, not as symbols (for the thought symbolized 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?"

Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, p. 85

As with so much of Proust, this passage opens up with the tangible, in this case the pregnancy of a kitchen maid, and then passes on to the transcendental, in this case the question of death.

M.Swann had compared the kitchen maid, "whose pregnancy had swelled and stoutened every part of her, even to her face, and the vertical, squared outlines of her cheeks," to Giotto's painting of Charity.