Was it that thinkers realized that so much of what people thought of as important was in fact built on sand? – Within a few years of this story's publication the Panama Canal debacle precipiated a financial crash in France (1888/9).

The French Romantic artist William-Adolphe Bouguereau was practically ridiculed by the Avant Garde. Was this beacuse he was a bourgeois painter from the west of France (and not a haut bourgeois Parisien) who aspired to the greatness of Raphael?