Autobiographical fiction; France -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction; Villages -- France -- Fiction
without any rendering in her facial expression of all its beauty and
spiritual significance, but carried as if it were an ordinary 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 virtue, 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 underground kitchen to
some one who had called down to ask her for it from the ground-level
above. The 'Invidia,' again, should have had some look on her face of
envy. But in this fresco, too, the symbol occupies so large a place and
is represented 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 matter, 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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