...the theme of Chairman Diesel was... Venice, or rather its famous carnival, which towards the end of the eighteenth century and of the Republic lasted for six months - a whole city singing and dancing for half a year in its campi and campielli, day and night, in a fatal fever of dissolution. So did this good man hold forth in a Venetian palazzo; he was the sort of conversationalist that would have explained the Trojan War to Homer.