Coming to the top of the staircase, up which he had
been followed by a servant with a pallid countenance and a small pigtail
clubbed at the back of his head, like one of Goya's sacristans or a
tabellion in an old play, Swann passed by an office in which the lackeys,
seated like notaries before their massive registers, rose solemnly to
their feet and inscribed his name. He next crossed a little hall
which--just as certain rooms are arranged by their owners to serve as the
setting for a single work of art (from which they take their name), and,
in their studied bareness, contain nothing else besides--displayed to him
as he entered it, like some priceless effigy by Benvenuto Cellini of an
armed watchman, a young footman, his body slightly bent forward, rearing
above his crimson gorget an even more crimson face, from which seemed to
burst forth torrents of fire, timidity and zeal, who, as he pierced the
Aubusson tapestries that screened the door of the room in which the music
was being given with his impetuous, vigilant, desperate gaze, appeared,
with a soldierly impassibility or a supernatural faith--an allegory of
alarums, incarnation of alertness, commemoration of a riot--to be looking
out, angel or sentinel, from the tower of dungeon or cathedral, for the
approach of the enemy or for the hour of Judgment.
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