Juan Gris Man in the Cafe

Juan Gris Man in the CafeJuan Gris Landscape with Houses at CeretGeorge Bellows Club NightCaravaggio The Seven Acts of MercyCaravaggio The Lute Player
men, with beards that weren’t really beards but more like groups of individual hairs clustering together for mutual protection, and many of them had that vague, unworldly expression that you get from spending too much time in the presence of boiling mercury.
It wasn’t relaxed attitude to potassium cyanide, for example, or had distilled some interesting fungi, drunk the result, and then stepped off the roof to play with the fairies. There weren’t actually very many widows and orphans, of course, because alchemists found it difficult to relate to other people long enough, and generally if they ever managed to marry it was only to have someone to hold their crucibles.
By and large, the only skill the alchemists of Ankh-Morpork had discovered so far was the ability to turn gold into less gold.
Until now . . . that alchemists hated other alchemists. They often didn’t notice them, or thought they were walruses. And so their tiny, despised Guild had never aspired to the powerful status of the Guilds of, say, the Thieves or the Beggars or the Assassins, but devoted itself instead to the aid of widows and families of those alchemists who had taken an overly