One of the first scenes in the British writer Fay Weldon’s new novel takes place amid “the peaches and cream décor” of the Bulgari jewelry store on Sloane Street in London.… Readers may not know that Bulgari, the Italian jewelry company, paid Ms. Weldon an undisclosed sum for a prominent place in the book, fittingly entitled The Bulgari Connection. —The Times, September 3, 2001
Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your earrings,
Within whose massy hoops, which feed the sense
That craves their argent light, there doth reside
A pearl beyond all price, except to those
Who have already oped their coffers vast
To that esteemed Bulgari, dearest merchant
I’th’affections of my noble friends,
To whom alone this unsurpassing pair
Is now available online, for nought
But fifteen hundred bucks and fifty cents.
Tush, enough of bargains; may mine eyes
Let fall their jewels on this unlucky stiff.
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them,
The good is oft interred with their bones,
Unless these men of high estate have shown
The foresight to invest with prudence sound
Their assets, hedg’d more thickly than the glade
Wherein Dian, beloved of the moon,
Did trippingly ensnare the panting hart;
For if my Lords of Morgan and of Stanley,
And thou, fair Dean, whose arm doth yet
Embrace old Witter in its reach, do take
The proffered purse, in mutual assurance
Of thy unbounded funds, why then, we yield
The restless clay of this unhappy frame
Sans weeping, for we know our eldest sons
Will never have to do a stroke of work.
Brutus, whose liquidity I doubt,
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious;
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it,
Tho’ not as grievously as those who mouth
Their wither’d answers to the empty air,
And find their cell phone orphan’d of all force,
When they forgot to charge it overnight;
Whereas the lusty Panasonick hath
A battery ingenious devised,
The Superflux T20, that endures
More deeply than the blasted oak, whose limbs,
Like to the babe’s, will ne’er be sundered from
The bosom of the earth. And thus, hands-free,
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest
(For Brutus is an honorable man,
So are they all, all honorable men),
Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral:
A heavy task, eas’d only by the ride,
More soft than any steed, that I enjoyed
Upon the sooty couch of my sedan.
Ah! Infiniti, whose very name
Doth footings to eternity vouchsafe,
With ABS as standard as the breath
Of mortals; ah, thy wheels, whose alloy trim
Outlives the jasper of the Afric soil,
Or marble of those columns orgulous
Which yet the uneyed Samson did, in love’s
Despite, reduce to flinted waste! And all
For payments down of half a grand a month.
Methinks there is much reason in his sayings.
If thou consider rightly of the matter,
Caesar has had great wrong, and we are dopes.
Wherefore dopes? Fie! Rubies red as fire
Can you and I, who feast on orts and leavings,
Ill afford.
’Tis so; and yet I hear
Word that the King of Burger graciously
Doth even now his whoppers grill’d with flame
Unburthen, three for price of twain. Avaunt,
And dip our napkins in his sacred sauce.
Exeunt.
2005