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| źródło = A. Mickiewicz, ''op. cit.'', Book XII, verses 25–27}}
So what exactly is a centrepiece? Imagine the familiar stand for salt and pepper shakers. Sometimes you may come across more elaborate versions with cruets of vinegar and olive oil, and a napkin holder. And now imagine this kind of stand, but blown up to gigantic proportions, so that is takes up half of the table, and with rich ornamentation at thatto boot. This is what a centrepiece, also known by the French term, ''surtout de table'' (literally, "all over the table"), is.
The centrepiece which the Tribune dug out from the storage was enormous even by Baroque standards. On a round tray the size of a carriage wheel<ref>A. Mickiewicz, ''op. cit.'', Book XII, verse 34</ref> there stood at least thirty porcelain figurines "dressed in Polish apparel".<ref>A. Mickiewicz, ''op. cit.'', Book XII, verses 42–43</ref> These figures represented a scene from a typical local political assembly of Old Polish times – an election campaign, a vote tally, an unsuccessful veto, the winner's joy and the loser's wife's grief. I won't be going into details here; if you want, you can read the Tribune's description of the scene, to which Lord Chamberlain quipped, "that election's quite curious, we grant, but just now we are hungry; it's food that we want."<ref>A. Mickiewicz, ''op. cit.'', Book XII, verses 122–123</ref>
