What's a fool when he's alone? Who's contradiction does he expose? Whose hidden tyrannies overturn?
Peter had now been traveling with the party for some weeks. And travel they did, making miles nearly every day. And as he met each of the troupe, they each revealed themselves to be a fool is some way or another. Peter had seen Walter Map especially as a stalwart and serious type upon first meeting, only to find now that his foolishness came in the slow syrup drip of long buffoon speeches thudding to ground in terrible puns. His tenor more serious, the irony a steady roil. He was, in essence, a British type.
And the classic fools too—flotsam and jetsam, err, Mlle. Harlaquin and M. Herlaquin—were indeed the proverbial lone trees in the woods, nonetheless upturning everything, even without an audience. Little vortices of trickishness. Never cruel because there was nothing behind it. No standard borne secretly.
