The fad of that time was to carry on one's person the discarded chains of the giants. It had begun as the earnest gesture of a few earnest penitents who would hang heavy lengths across their shoulders, or tied to their watch fobs or belts. There was no point in showing them off, since a gesture of solidarity with those now so far away could only be futile, but neither was there any point in hiding them, for all the noise they made. So they hung matter of factly, reflecting moral gravity in their physical weight, until, as inevitably as one might expect, some callow scenester confused gravity with gravitas. This misbegotten reach for an indefinable but unearned legitimacy must have led him to drape the links with a little too much delicacy, too much precision, beginning the gradual degradation of rite into fashion. It was soon not seen unseemly to ask a silversmith or jeweler to work a few chains into a longer one, or to link them with a ring. Then entire waistcoats or sashes were wrought this way, and the chains that had once seemed impossible to dispose of were suddenly scarce.

Testimonies to the excess of this newfound economy—such as the collapse, from the weight of a hoard, of a watchmaker's first-floor apartment into his shop or the accidental asphyxiation of a young student whose chains, dragged along the ground, had been caught by a passing ambulance—were hardly sufficient to dissuade. Finally the manacles themselves could be seen dangled loosely round the necks of some fashionable gentlemen or tightly round the waists of some fashionable ladies. To the sensibilities of scarcely years before—of these very people!—such displays would have been met with speechless, gaping horror; one can only ascribe them to giddiness and relief that came with the end of the war. Nonetheless, is it not perplexing that any of them should have voiced surprise when precisely that horror was the reaction when the first ambassadors from the newly founded countries finally returned?