The initial letters of their names happily constituted the word cabal, which with even greater serendipity had a slightly sinister echo of the word cabbala (a secret mystical tradition of Jewish rabbis uncovering hidden meanings in the Bible.)

Sir W. Rose has works that bear painful evidence of failing health; indeed, his group of the Duc et Duchesse d'Aumale (705), with the Prince de Condé and the Duc de Guise, is quite unfinished and even blotted. The face of the Duke is refined, but weak; the colour is pale, and the background only a dabble of unarranged and undrilled touches.

How would you like to live forever, cut into little pieces? Seem like if we were immortal that or something equivalent would be the common fate. There is the Greek myth of someone who was granted the boon of immortality and just kept getting older and older.

Different types of immortality have different potential drawbacks, true. You described the Oz immortality which was always a source of Fridge Horror.

Coal-scuttle poke-bonnets, short and scanty skirts, huge splay feet arrayed in indescribable shoes and boots, colours which swore at each other - these were the outward and visible signs of the British fair of that day.