Still, there are fears that other NATO and coalition leaders, many from countries whose populaces oppose the war, might be prompted to follow Mr. Sarkozy's lead.
Like a contemporary photograph of a world leader shaking hands with the pope, "The Lamentation" includes portraits of the Duke and Duchess of Ferrara mourning their savior, an image whose public display would have constantly reminded the populace of their rulers' piety.
This had the startling effect of transforming the audience into the Roman populace, whose moods and whims the actors were manipulating.
Like Northern Ireland, it is a small, clannish territory whose well-armed populace is deeply, and about evenly, divided over questions of political and cultural identity which anyway have no clear-cut or rational answer.
Addressing packed rooms, Ms. Williams turns the microphone over to the people of Wyoming — a stoical populace whose habitual stance against something they don't like is a tight lip.
Founded in 1996 to compete in the Western Professional Hockey League, the Ice Bats managed to win over a populace whose devotion to University of Texas football had cast all other sporting clubs in the role of false idols.
In 2003, Stewart, a former British diplomat, joined the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq and was posted to the southern province of Maysan, where he found himself the de-facto governor of a restive populace whose allegiances were split among fifty-four political parties, twenty major tribes, and numerous militias.
They're amazed by just how much stuff their idols have, and though they don't have a lucidly political bone in their bodies, they manage somehow to turn Paris Hilton and company into modern-day Marie Antoinettes, and themselves into the poor populace whose unjust deprivations aren't in the realm of sustenance but of style.
"General MacArthur described a depressing quagmire where the U.S. Army controlled only 117 miles out of a total of 116,000 square miles, a hostile country where Americans could not venture out alone and a shell-shocked populace whose hatred for their oppressors grew each day," he writes.
Though largely a happy fantasy of glittering lagoons and a stylish populace whose orderly disportment anticipates Georges Seurat's "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grand Jatte" -- more than 220 figures are seen, including a hungry dog scavenging a lunch basket -- it does not shirk from reality.
