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.
Despite all the admiration that M. Swann might profess 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.
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