My Year With Proust - Day 239

   "No, no, Mamma dear, we won't let you suffer like that, we'll find something to take it away, have patience just for a moment; let me give you a kiss, darling - no, you're not to move."

   And stooping over the bed, with her knees bent, almost kneeling on the ground, as though by an exercise of humility she would have a better chance of making acceptable the impassioned gift of herself, she lowered towards my grandmother her whole life contained her face as in a ciborium which she was holding out to her, adorned with dimples and folds so passionate, so sorrowful, so sweet that one could not have said whether they had been engraved on it by a kiss, a sob or a smile.  My grandmother too tried to lift up her face to Mamma's.  It was so altered that probably, had she been strong enough to go out, she would have been recognised only by the feather in her hat.  Her features, as though during a modeling session, seemed to be straining with an effort which distracted her from everything else, to conform to some particular model which we failed to identify.  The work of the sculptor was nearing its end, and if my grandmother's face had shrunk in the process, it had at the same time hardened.  The veins that traversed it seemed those not of marble, but of some more rugged stone.  Permanently thrust forward by the difficulty that she found in breathing, and as permanently withdrawn into itself by exhaustion, her face, worn, diminished, terrifyingly expressive, seemed like the rude, flushed, purplish, desperate face of some wild guardian of a tomb in a primitive, almost prehistoric sculpture.  But the work was not yet complete.  Next, the mould must be broken, and then, into that tomb which had been so painfully guarded, with that tense exertion the finished effigy lowered.

Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, pp. 334-335

Marcel's grandmother's health continues to fail.  The section takes me back to the moment very early in Swann's Way where his mother held her face close for him to kiss in a fashion that almost felt like a believer taking communion.  "And stooping over the bed, with her knees bent, almost kneeling on the ground, as though by an exercise of humility she would have a better chance of making acceptable the impassioned gift of herself, she lowered towards my grandmother her whole life contained her face as in a ciborium which she was holding out to her, adorned with dimples and folds so passionate, so sorrowful, so sweet that one could not have said whether they had been engraved on it by a kiss, a sob or a smile."

Proust's description of his grandmother's features shrinking in the hands of the sculptor reminds me of the grandmother (if I remember correctly) Gabriel Garcia-Marquez's brilliant One Hundred Years of Solitude who keeps shrinking (in classic magical realism fashion) until she is held as a baby.