If you are interested in in optics or mineralogy or funding a dictionary of philosophy, you are lucky to get two minutes of the attention of a margrave who lives for killing stags or boar in inventive ways. You are n some endless corridor of some windy schloss, and there is the clatter of men, scratching themselves, impatient for the off with their noise and weapons and rolling obscenities, and you are trying to tell His Serene Highness that you need money - a great deal of money - for a wind-furnace to test the melting point of iron ore.
E. de Waal, The white road (2015), 139
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