Some final associations remain between the touchstones of deception, wager, and style, and our one proposed intermediary and theoretical exemplar, inspired by Jankélévitch's text on irony alone: that of “juggling”—of what a composer might (or might not) have been negotiating, before putting into place negations that excite to this day irony's classic effect: “What? But how can this be so?!” To play the tables at Monte Carlo would be one thing, wagering notes in the concert hall quite another, as Roland-Manuel realized at the premiere of L’enfant et les sortilèges in 1926. Presaging Jankélévitch's aesthetic, he declared that of all Ravel's wagers to date, L’enfant numbered among the greatest, and upon finishing his biography (the first), he recast the idea on a larger canvas, as Jankélévitch was publishing his study of Ravel. “During my twenty years with Ravel,” writes Roland-Manuel in 1938, “[I] gathered up the secrets of modernity, the means of going against one's times, from a man of iron will, who, like most creators of enduring wealth, sought perfection less in the exceptional than in playing strictly by the rules of the game.”