Ennui rises suddenly on a Monday. Rusty water from the bouches de lavage slooshes down the street gutters. Woodsmoke puffs from a hungover baker’s chimney. Leathery charwomen put out the morning’s underthings before the air infuses with soot and sweat.

Through the time machine of poetic license, let us take a sight-seeing tour. A day in Ennui over the course of 250 years.

We take as the subject of tonight’s lecture the great painter at the vanguard of the French Splatter-school Action-group, Mr. Moses Rosenthaler. Widely celebrated, as you know, for the bold, dramatic style and colossal scale of his middle-period — in particular, of course, the polyptych-tableaux known as “Ten Reinforced Cement Aggregate (Load- bearing) Murals” — he remains, in my opinion, the most eloquent (and, certainly, the loudest) artistic voice of his rowdy generation.

How does this pivotal piece come to find its way into its unique position as a permanent installation here at the Clampette Collection? The story begins in a mess hall.

It began as a holiday. Arthur Howitzer, Jr, college freshman, eager to escape a bright future on the Great Plains, convinced his father (proprietor of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun) to fund his trans-Atlantic passage as an educational opportunity to learn the family business through the production of a series of travelogue columns to be published for local readers in the Sunday “Picnic” magazine. Over the next ten years, he assembled a team of the best expatriate journalists of his time and transformed “Picnic” into “The French Dispatch”: a factual weekly report on the subjects of world politics, the arts (high and low), fashion, fancy cuisine/fine drink, and diverse stories of human-interest set in faraway quartiers. He brought the world to Kansas.

His writers line the spines of every good American library.

“Do students of the table dream in flavors?” This was the first of the questions a reporter for this magazine had diligently prepared in advance of his encounter with Lieutenant Nescaffier, ranking chef at District Headquarters on the narrow river-peninsula known as the Rognure d’Ongle. All such queries were to remain unanswered in the course of that eventful evening.

March first. Negotiations between undergraduates and the university administration break down abruptly in early-morning hours after clamorous debate, angry name-calling, and, finally, outright gambling over: the right of free- access to the girls dormitory for all male students.

The protest (which ended in a stalemate) gave the superficial appearance of a vanity exercise for the pimple-cream and wet-dream contingent; but, in fact, the sexes were equally represented, and all participants emphasized the basis of their frustration: a desire (more: a biological need) for freedom, full-stop.

It has exploded into symbolism, and everybody’s talking about it.