He knew he could not win and chose to spare himself the humiliating details of once-cherished teammates testifying against him, of other evidence rolled out to expose the dark side of the fairy tale.
So I don't think it was unusual for Bartok to pick a revisionist rendition of a dark and terror-filled fairy tale as the libretto for his first and only opera, Duke Bluebeard's Castle.
The premodern tale tellers might also be thought of as descendants of the scops of the Anglo-Saxon Dark Ages or of the griots of West Africa, men whose job it was to carry stories.
But wait at the coffee shops after dark to talk to some of Muscat's bloggers and tweeters and a different picture emerges, of tell-tale clicks on the line during phone conversations, of unusual activity on Facebook pages.