A charlatan arrives in a European town in the seventeenth century.
Night-black coach, black horses. Clowns. Tightrope walkers. Star entertainers. A crowd gathers, because of course it does, and the entertainers pull people in toward the demonstrations.1
Greene's line about what is actually happening:
The charlatan made entertainment seem like the business of the day; the business of the day was actually the sale of the elixirs and quack potions.1
Everything about this violates the rule Law 3 has just spent four pages establishing. The smoke screen is supposed to be grey, bland, familiar, unremarkable. This is a black coach with acrobats.
And it works — for about a week.
Greene has to concede the exception because his own material contains it:
although it is wiser to divert attention from your purposes by presenting a bland, familiar exterior, there are times when the colorful, conspicuous gesture is the right diversionary tactic.1
The mechanism: "Dazzled by a great show, the public would not notice the charlatans' real intentions."1
So Part II contains two opposite technologies for the same job. The bland version starves attention — nothing to look at, so nobody looks. The colourful version saturates it — so much to look at that the one relevant thing is lost inside the abundance.
Both work. They fail completely differently, and that difference is the useful part.
This is what makes the passage worth a page rather than a paragraph, because Greene does something here he almost never does: he gives a technique an expiry.
Spectacle and entertainment, clearly, are excellent devices to conceal your intentions, but they cannot be used indefinitely. The public grows tired and suspicious, and eventually catches on to the trick.2
And then the operational consequence, stated as a fact about how these people actually lived:
And indeed the charlatans had to move quickly from town to town, before word spread that the potions were useless and the entertainment a trick.2
Against the travelling charlatans he sets three men who never had to move:
Powerful people with bland exteriors, on the other hand—the Talleyrands, the Rothschilds, the Selassies—can practice their deceptions in the same place throughout their lifetimes. Their act never wears thin, and rarely causes suspicion.2
Two techniques, and the entire difference is duration.
The asymmetry isn't arbitrary, and working out why explains a great deal beyond charlatans.
A colourful smoke screen is memorable by construction. That's the whole point — the spectacle has to be striking enough to absorb attention. But memorable material gets retold, compared across occasions, and eventually assembled into a pattern by people comparing notes.
The black coach that dazzled town one is the black coach that town two has heard about. Every performance generates the evidence for its own detection, and the evidence is durable because the whole design made it vivid.
A bland exterior generates no evidence at all. There is nothing to retell about Talleyrand's face. Nobody in one salon can compare notes with somebody in another, because neither has anything to report. The technique produces no residue, which is why it can run for fifty years in one city.
So the trade is legible: the colourful screen buys stronger concealment per occasion and pays for it in accumulating exposure. The bland screen conceals less forcefully in any single moment and is renewable indefinitely.
And notice the second-order consequence, which Greene names without drawing out. The charlatans "had to move quickly from town to town." The technique doesn't merely expire — it dictates a way of life. A person committed to the loud version cannot build anything in one place, cannot accumulate relationships, and must keep finding fresh audiences forever. Selassie ruled a country for four decades. The charlatans ran.
The decay rate isn't a footnote on the method. It selects who can use it and what kind of life they end up with.
Greene's guidance is one sentence — "The colorful smoke screen should be used cautiously, then, and only when the occasion is right"2 — and he never says which occasions.
The case supplies the answer. The charlatans used spectacle because they had a one-shot transaction with a fresh audience, and no need for anything afterwards. Under those conditions the decay rate is irrelevant: you only needed the screen to hold for the duration of the sale.
Which gives the real criterion. Not caution — repetition. If you will deal with these people once and never again, the loud version is strictly better, because its stronger per-occasion effect is free and its cost falls on a future you don't have with them. If you'll be here next year, it's the worst available choice.
You're evaluating something and there's a lot going on — a launch, a pitch, an event with production values well beyond what the substance seems to need.
Don't read the spectacle as evidence of confidence or of fraud. It's neither. Read it as a statement about expected duration.
Ask: does this party expect to deal with me again? A vendor building a decade-long relationship has no reason to overwhelm you, and every reason not to — the residue would cost them later. Heavy production against a small substance means somebody has priced in one transaction.
That's checkable rather than cynical. Look at what they're asking for. A single large commitment now, with the relationship afterwards unspecified, is the charlatan's shape regardless of anyone's honesty.
The practical move in the room: find the thing that isn't performing. In a saturated environment the relevant item is the one item not competing for your eye — the clause, the number, the term nobody has built a slide for. The spectacle tells you where not to look by telling you where everyone else is looking.
And from the other direction, if you're the one considering the loud version: count the audience. If you will face these same people again, you are choosing a technique that will be assembled into a pattern by people comparing notes, and the assembly is not optional. You are buying this quarter with next year.
Strongest support. Rare for this book: a technique presented with its failure conditions and an observable behavioural consequence (constant travel) that corroborates the claimed decay. The contrast set — charlatans against Talleyrand, Rothschild and Selassie — is Greene's own and is well chosen.
Tension — it dismantles Part II's stated rule. Part II opens by asserting that the bland exterior is "often the perfect smoke screen" and that "the grayer and more uniform the smoke… the better." The Reversal concedes an entire opposite technology and gives no criterion for choosing. The reader is left with two contradictory instructions and "use cautiously."
Tension — against Law 6. Court Attention at All Cost argues spectacle is the primary currency and obscurity is death. This passage says spectacle is a diversionary tactic with a short shelf life. Same author, same book, and the tension pairs with the one already logged between Law 3 and Law 6 on blandness.
Tension — the charlatans are a strange endorsement. Greene's own bibliography includes a history of charlatanry, and this material presents itinerant fraudsters selling useless potions as practitioners worth learning from. The document-don't-endorse note applies: the technique is real, the practitioners were defrauding sick people, and Greene's register makes no distinction.
🚩 SINGLE SOURCE · 🚩 SECONDARY WITHOUT PRIMARY — no named charlatan, no date, no location; the account is a composite drawn from popular history. [POPULAR SOURCE].
Open questions.
Greene's The Repentant Rogue — the other half of this same Reversal, a few lines earlier — deals with what happens when your reputation for deception catches up with you.
Read together, the two halves describe one life cycle rather than two options.
The colourful screen generates exposure at a known rate. The repentant rogue is what you do when the exposure completes. Barnum is the charlatan who stopped running: instead of moving to the next town before word spread, he let word spread, published it himself, and converted the accumulated notoriety into the product.
That's a genuine resolution to the decay problem and Greene doesn't connect his own two paragraphs. The charlatans' constraint was that the residue was fatal. Barnum's discovery was that a large enough residue becomes an asset — at which point you can stop travelling.
So the sequence is: run loud, accumulate exposure, and then either keep moving forever or cash the notoriety once. The charlatans took the first branch; Barnum took the second; and the bland operators never entered the game at all.
→ business · Attention as the Last Moat
The business page holds that attention is the scarce defensible asset and that everything else is downstream of capturing it.
The charlatans were operating that thesis three hundred years early, and the decay rate is what the modern version usually leaves out.
The page's frame treats captured attention as an accumulating moat — you build an audience and it compounds. The charlatan case shows attention captured by spectacle doing the opposite: each capture consumes some of the audience's willingness to be captured again, and the depletion is why the coach had to keep moving.
The distinction the pairing produces: attention captured by spectacle depletes its own source; attention captured by usefulness renews it. And that's a diagnostic you can run on any operation. If the same audience needs a bigger production each time to produce the same response, you are on the charlatan curve and the moat is evaporating while the metrics look fine.
Which reframes the modern anxiety about escalating content costs. It isn't a market getting harder. It's the decay rate Greene named, running on a schedule set by how fast the audience tires — and the only exits are the two his own Reversal describes: keep finding new towns, or convert the notoriety once and stop.
→ history · Augustus the Master Showman
Augustus ran spectacle at enormous scale — games, monuments, a fully performed public character — for decades, in one city, without the decay this passage says is structural.
That is a direct counterexample, and resolving it produces the criterion Greene omits.
The charlatan's spectacle was a diversion: entertainment pointed away from the transaction, and the audience who eventually looked past it found nothing behind it but useless potions. The discovery is what killed the technique.
Augustus's spectacle was the substance: the games and monuments were the legitimacy he was selling. There was nothing behind them to discover, because they weren't concealing anything. An audience looking harder at Augustus's games found more Augustus.
The insight neither source states alone: spectacle decays when it is a screen and compounds when it is the product. Which means the decay rate isn't a property of loudness at all — it's a property of the gap between what the spectacle shows and what is actually being transacted. Wide gap, fast decay, keep moving. No gap, and you can do it in the same city for forty years and be remembered for it.
That also explains Barnum, who is otherwise anomalous. He closed the gap by publishing it. Once the trick was the product, the decay stopped.
Sharpest implication. Greene gives this technique something he gives almost nothing else in the book: an expiry date, and one that dictates a whole way of living. The charlatans "had to move quickly from town to town" — the method selected their lives, not just their tactics. Which is the general form worth carrying: any technique that generates memorable residue is a technique that requires a supply of fresh audiences, and anyone committed to it has quietly accepted that they can never stay anywhere.
Generative questions.