reflection
A rather liberal hotel owner holds reservations for 100 rooms made by 100 hotel guests. Monsieur L’Avare has quietly booked himself half of those rooms (because he can). The Bradys and their good friends the Guptas decided to book out the next 40 rooms. They also can, but good taste dictates some degree of rationale for the indulgence.
It is said that the youngest Gupta has a certain talent for playing the cello — the kind that comes only once in a generation of obscenely rich people. It was mandated that, to best concentrate on his craft, every two rooms in each Cartesian direction be vacated, so as not to lay siege to the young virtuoso’s incredible gift to the world.
Speaking of gifts, the remaining 90 guests were bequeathed the last 10 rooms. To properly perform the accounting, it is worth mentioning that 50 guests somehow managed to squeeze into but two rooms. This was deemed not only sensible but necessary by the hotel establishment, to which our more esteemed guests politely agreed.
This arrangement was mostly stable, with the occasional complaints from the patriarch of the Brady family that the other guests were rather disruptive at times. He had advanced his suspicions that some were even encroaching on Monsieur L’Avare’s empty spaces, an evident breach of contract. But for the most part, such an equilibrium remained.
That is, of course, until a hotel guest were to leave L’Hôtel Le Miroir and re-enter a society where such strange mental arithmetic surely did not apply.