Swann's Way

until then had represented merely so many pleasures to be sought after,
boredoms to be avoided, or courtesies to be acknowledged--were at rest,
measurable by aesthetic co-ordinates alone, in the autonomy of their
curves and angles. And in these men, in the thick of whom Swann now
found himself packed, there was nothing (even to the monocle which many
of them wore, and which, previously, would, at the most, have enabled
Swann to say that so-and-so wore a monocle) which, 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 did not regard General de Froberville and the Marquis de Bréaute, who
were talking together just inside the door, as anything more than 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 like a shell-splinter in his common, scarred,
victorious, overbearing face, in the middle of a forehead which it
left half-blinded, like the single-eyed flashing front of the Cyclops,
appeared to Swann as a monstrous wound which it might have been glorious