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By Root 1333 0

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 gushed torrents of fire, timidity and zeal, who, as he pierced with his impetuous, vigilant, desperate gaze the Aubusson tapestries screening the door of the room in which the music was being given, appeared, with a soldierly impassiveness or a supernatural faith—an allegory of alarums, incarnation of alertness, commemoration of the call to arms—to be watching, angel or sentinel, from the tower of a castle or cathedral, for the approach of the enemy or for the hour of Judgment. Swann had now only to enter the concert-room, the doors of which were thrown open to him by an usher loaded with chains, who bowed low before him as though tendering to him the keys of a conquered city. But he thought of the house in which at that very moment he might have been if Odette had only permitted it, and the remembered glimpse of an empty milk-can upon a door-mat wrung his heart.

Swann speedily recovered his sense of the general ugliness of the human male when, on the other side of the tapestry curtain, the spectacle of the servants gave place to that of the guests. But even this ugliness of faces which of course were mostly familiar to him seemed something new now that their features—instead of being to him symbols of practical utility in the identification of this or that person who until then had represented merely so many pleasures to be pursued, boredoms to be avoided, or courtesies to be acknowledged—rested in the autonomy of their lines, measurable by aesthetic co-ordinates alone. And in these men by whom Swann now found himself surrounded there was nothing, down to the monocles which many of them wore (and which previously would at the most have enabled Swann to say that so-and-so wore a monocle) that, no longer restricted to the general connotation of a habit, the same in all of them, did not now strike him with a sense of individuality in each. Perhaps because he regarded General de Froberville and the Marquis de Bréauté, who were talking to each other just inside the door, simply as two figures in a picture, whereas they were the old and useful friends who had put him up for the Jockey Club and had supported him in duels, the General’s monocle, stuck between his eyelids like a shell-splinter in his vulgar, scarred and overbearing face, in the middle of a forehead which it dominated like the single eye of the Cyclops, appeared to Swann as a monstrous wound which it might have been glorious to receive but which it was indecent to expose, while that which M. de Bréauté sported, as a festive badge, with his pearl-grey gloves, his crush hat and white tie, substituting it for the familiar pair of glasses (as Swann himself did) when he went to society functions, bore, glued to its other side, like a specimen prepared on a slide for the microscope, an infinitesimal gaze that swarmed with affability and never ceased to twinkle at the loftiness of the ceilings, the delightfulness of the entertainment, the interestingness of the programmes and the excellence of the refreshments.

“Hallo, you here! Why, it’s ages since we’ve seen you,” the General greeted Swann and, noticing his drawn features and concluding that it was perhaps a serious illness that had kept him away, added: “You’re looking well, old man!” while M. de Bréauté exclaimed: “My dear fellow, what on earth are you doing here?” to a society novelist who had just fitted into the angle of eyebrow and cheek a monocle that was his sole instrument of psychological investigation and remorseless analysis, and who now replied with an air of mystery and self-importance, rolling the “r”: “I am observing!”

The Marquis de Forestelle’s monocle was minute and rimless, and, by enforcing an incessant and painful contraction of the eye in which it was embedded like a superfluous cartilage the presence of which is inexplicable and its substance unimaginable, gave to his face a melancholy refinement, and led women to suppose him capable of