EPILOGUE
   What matters most, the satisfaction of the appetite for power, success, and celebrity, or the verdict of history? JMC said that no man's biography should be written until at least a century after his death; only then would, at best, history have judged him the embodiment of some higher standard of achievement and accomplishment. As for the worst? JMC's choice vacillated between villainy and oblivion. One may live for the moment, but after the moment is eternity.
   Despite the variety of interpretive possibilities posed by these MONUMENTS TO JMC, there can be no doubt that through them JMC sought to arrest change on a strictly personal level --- in sum, to ensure his own immortality and permanence in a transient world. The deteriorated condition of his monuments (an undeniable consequence of the process of decay and dissolution, of chaos emerging phoenix-like from order) necessarily poses the question of the ultimate success or failure, of the validity or futility, of his vision.

The stones do not speak; each must decide.