What do you call it when you excuse yourself from a fine meal of steak and green beans to go outside and smoke a cigarette — in the chill autumn air — and out of the corner of your eye you see a particularly derelict-looking homeless man; you try not to make eye contact, but you have a bit of a staring problem, so the homeless man sees that you’re looking at him and approaches you; he asks you for a cigarette and you go ahead and give him one: because he looks fucking cold, and you are in the middle of a nice steak dinner, and what’s one cigarette? …then the two of you are smoking — in the chill autumn air — and he starts talking to you about his life; how he was once the captain of a merchant vessel, with a beautiful fiance and his whole life ahead of him: but then he was betrayed by his best friend and thrown into prison on trumped-up treason charges; but while in prison he met an old man who taught him sword fighting and capitalism: then the old man died — but not before revealing the location of a fantastic treasure — and then he escaped, found the treasure, defrauded the people of Paris into thinking he was nobility, and exacted intricate vengeance upon all who betrayed him?

Allusions of Grandeur