every sculptor's
studio, the palaces, and even the King's armorial bearings were invaded
by winged bulls with human heads, just as formerly the museums were full
of cupids or cherubims, "with their cravat-like wings". Certain school
books for primary schools were actually printed in cuneiform characters
in order to enhance their authority over the youthful imagination.

This imperial orgy in bricks and mortar having unhappily occasioned the
seventh, eighth, and ninth bankruptcy of the State and several
consecutive inundations of paper-money, the people in general rejoiced
to see after this brilliant reign the crown borne by a philosophical
financier. Order had hardly been re-established in the finances, when he
made his preparation for applying on a grand scale his ideal of
government, which was of a highly remarkable nature. One was not long in
noticing, in fact, after his accession, that all the newly chosen ladies
of honour, who were otherwise very intelligent but entirely lacking in
wit, were chiefly conspicuous for their striking ugliness; that the
liveries of the court were of a grey and lifeless colour; that the court
balls reproduced by instantaneous cinematography to the tune of millions
of copies furnished a collection of the most honest and insignificant
faces and unappetising forms that one could possibly see; that the
candidates recently appointed, after a preliminary despatch of their
portraits, to the highest dignities of the Empire, were pre-eminently
distinguished by the commonness of their bearing; in short, that the
races and the public holidays (the date of which were notified in
advance by secret telegrams announcing the arrival of a cyclone from
America), happened nine times out of ten to take place on a day of thick
fog, or of pelting rain, which transformed them into an immense array of
waterproofs and umbrellas. Alike in his legislative proposals, as in his
appointments, the choice of the prince was always the following: the
most useful and the best among the most unattractive. An insufferable
sameness of colour, a depressing monotony, a sickening insipidity were
the distinctive note of all the acts of the government. People laughed,
grew excited, waxed indignant, and got used to it. The result was that
at the end of a certain time it was impossible to meet an office-seeker
or a politician, that is to say, an artist or literary man, out of his
element and in search of the beautiful in an alien sp