Parbleu! A Monday without "consequences"

Even Gérard, summoning his best never complain, never explain mode, would scarcely allow himself to hear of it, when the White House Chief of Staff portrayed the horror of a Monday without consequences - short, he brightened to suggest, of annihilating some of the suf-ferers. Oh, the decline of wit, some muttered, perilously close to the sin of disgust, plunging the silver into the mustard to assuage the wilting pâté. Not that this depredation of chemistry seemed the outrage, anymore, that it used to be. And so they gathered, to draw up a list of cornichons of correction, petty torpedoes of tartness to assure a Monday of demonstrable consequences. But the disturbance was as short-lived as the delicate little thwacking promised by the Chief of Staff, as a consensus coalesced around an airlift of floppy purple fingers, tiramisù left over from the buffet of the Emerald City, to point the way to saving face all 'round.