The Recognitions - pg. 72

Il faut toujours en avoir sur soi, de l'argent, vous savez ...
Like lions, out of the gates, into the circus arena, cars roared into the open behind the Opera from the mouth of the Rue Mogador. Around it this faked Imperial Rome lay in pastiche on the banks of its Tiber: though Tiber's career, from the Apennine ravines of Tuscany, skirting the Sabine mountains to course through Rome and reach with two arms into the sea, finds unambitious counterpart in the Seine, diked and dammed across the decorous French countryside, proper as wallpaper. Nevertheless, they had done their best with what they had. The Napoleons tried very hard. The first one combed his hair, and that of his wife and brothers, like Julius Caesar and his family combed theirs. J. L. David (having painted pictures of Brutus, Andromanche, and the Horatii) painted his picture looking, as best he could manage, like Julius Caesar; and Josephine doing her very best (the Coronation) to look above suspicion herself. Everyone rallied round, erecting arches, domes, pediments, and copied what the Romans had copied from the Greeks. Empire furniture, candlesticks, coiffures ... somewhere beyond them hung the vision of Constantine's Rome, its eleven forums, ten basilicas, eighteen aqueducts, thirty seven city gates, two arenas, two circuses, thirty-seven triumphal arches, five obelisks, four hundred and twenty-three temples with their statues of the gods in ivory and gold. But all that was gone. There was no competition now. Not since Pope Urban VIII had declared the Coliseum a public quarry.