You have spent a laborious life in defending a silly medieval tradition of government.

You are using all the apparatus of the modern world to perpetuate an ideal that is as old and dead as the Rameses dynasty.

Every time you use the telegraph to send orders in an emperor's name you commit an anachronism." The count frowned and growled.
"Don't talk to me like that.

It is not amusing." "No; it is not funny.

To see men like you fetching and carrying for dull kings, who would drop through the gallows or go to planting turnips without your brains--it does not appeal to my sense of humor or to my imagination." "You put it coarsely," remarked the old man grimly.