Swann's Way

dreams, leaning upon his shield, while all around him are fighting and
bloodshed and death; detached from the group of his companions who were
thronging about Swann, he seemed as determined to remain unconcerned in
the scene, which he followed vaguely with his cruel, greenish eyes, as
if it had been the Massacre of the Innocents or the Martyrdom of Saint
James. He seemed precisely to have sprung from that vanished race--if,
indeed, it ever existed, save in the reredos of San Zeno and the
frescoes of the Eremitani, where Swann had come in contact with it, and
where it still dreams--fruit of the impregnation of a classical statue
by some one of the Master's Paduan models, or of Albert Duerer's Saxons.
And the locks of his reddish hair, crinkled by nature, but glued to his
head by brilliantine, were treated broadly as they are in that Greek
sculpture which the Mantuan painter never ceased to study, and which,
if in its creator's purpose it represents but man, manages at least to
extract from man's simple outlines such a variety of richness, borrowed,
as it were, from the whole of animated nature, that a head of hair,
by the glossy undulation and beak-like points of its curls, or in the