And I can
see now that those Virtues and Vices of Padua resembled her in another
respect as well. For just as the figure of this girl had been enlarged by
the additional symbol which she carried in her body, without appearing to
understand what it meant, 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.
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