"Quicksilver"

[fiefoe]

It's disconcerting when the protagonist completely goes of his rockers. In one elaborate hallucination, Jack had an entire musical around him peopled by fishwives, skeletons, grave-diggers competing with hornpipes, church-hymn and a 'merry Celtic reel'. Of course, we can also read this as another piece of evidence of the author's obsession with theatre:
    'The world was full of powerful men but as long as they played the same roles, they were as interchangeable as second-rate players speaking the same lines in the same theatre on different nights.'

Before Jack got on 'a slow boat to Nagasaki', or the equivalent of.

• "When you left Paris, coffee was not fashionable yet-not until the Turks fled from Vienna, and left mountains of it behind."
• (They) must have been put up by St.-George, who used them to channel and control the migrations of rats, as a general might tear down bridges in one part of a disputed territory while improvising new ones elsewhere.
  
• "The duc de Bourbon hosted a dinner party. Invited a certain eminent writer. Became annoyed with him. Emptied his snuffbox into the poor scribbler's wine when he wasn't looking, as a joke. The writer drank the wine and died of it - hilarious!"
  

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