Octave," I would then decide to go
indoors, and would go straight upstairs to my room to read. The
kitchen-maid was an abstract personality, a permanent institution to which
an invariable set of attributes assured a sort of fixity and continuity
and identity throughout the long series of transitory human shapes in
which that personality was incarnate; for we never found the same girl
there two years running. In the year in which we ate such quantities of
asparagus, the kitchen-maid whose duty it was to dress them was a poor
sickly creature, some way 'gone' in pregnancy when we arrived at Combray
for Easter, and it was indeed surprising that Francoise allowed her to run
so many errands in the town and to do so much work in the house, for she
was beginning to find a difficulty in bearing before her the mysterious
casket, fuller and larger every day, whose splendid outline could be
detected through the folds of her ample smocks. These last recalled the
cloaks in which Giotto shrouds some of the allegorical figures in his
paintings, of which M. Swann had given me photographs. He it was who
pointed out the resemblance, and when he inquired 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 mannish as to seem matrons
rather, in whom the Virtues are personified in the Arena Chapel.
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