"SWIFT as a shadow, short as any dream... So quick bright things come to confusion".
The two prime ministers put a brave face on it. They kept their dignity, and graciously refused to condemn the spoilers.
Mr John Major observed that it was "perfectly proper" for the participants to discuss the chairmanship. "I think that at the end of the day George Mitchell will prove acceptable... I hope and expect that he'll chair the plenary.
Mr Bruton, too, was upbeat. "We have something in place now which has enormous potential ... This is a truly enormous opportunity."
Both men stressed the grave responsibility on the participating parties to make the process work.
But, at the end of the day, there was no getting away from it. The prime ministers had fired the starting pistol, but Dr Paisley, Mr Trimble and their cohorts had firmly nailed everybody's feet to the starting blocks.
The unionists, en bloc, were over the moon. "It was Democracy, 10 Despotic Governments, nil," crowed Mr Robert McCartney.
"I am satisfied that today the unionists have fought their corner well," boomed Dr Paisley. "And I would say we've got our points over and we have succeeded in doing what we set out to do to keep the government from proceeding to strangle these talks, to hijack these talks and to destroy these talks and get the republican agenda into motion. That has not happened and it will not happen."
Mr Trimble was equally ebullient. The two governments' agenda had been "binned", he asserted. "The two governments are proceeding at the moment on our agenda. But it's not just our agenda it's an agenda for the negotiations as a whole. Because it establishes the point that it is all the parties to the negotiations who take decisions and that decisions cannot be imposed upon us by Dick Spring and Paddy Mayhew."
On the bright side, all the original participants are still in there. They are stripped for action and still nailed to the starting blocks.
On the dark side, Senator Mitchell is confined to the sidelines, listening to the proceedings on a link to an ante room. He is made of sterling stuff and patience must be part of it, but there must come a time when he shouts "Enough" and heads for the nearest air plane.
The potential for epistemological disputation is boundless, and the unionists will trawl it for ever and a day while it suits them. Mr Trimble revealed last night that the suggestion being circulated was "that the negotiations resolve themselves into a smaller commit with a view to working out a satisfactory definition of the role and function of a chairman".
It was a day of fever and ferment, a succession of media melees and frantic scrambles for sound bites, mainly centred around the most readily available subjects those who were left outside.
Mr Gerry Adams and his team were almost literally swamped in a sea of cameras and microphones. They piously denied that they had contrived all this attention but they were plainly at home with it.
Call it pantomime or circus, it was steeped in bathos, entirely predictable and totally lamentable considering the underlying gravity of the situation. Mr Major, quite understandably, snapped at one interviewer later. "This isn't a media carnival ... These are serious negotiations about the future of Northern Ireland."
The repartee was mischievous but marvellous, including some gems which must be put on the record. It was whispered that Senator Mitchell had met Mr John Taylor in the Europa Hotel with a tart verbal thrust. "Let me nail one thing on the head I'm not an Irish American Catholic, I'm a Lebanese Maronite".
And Mr Taylor reportedly responded. "That's great. I have a house in north Cyprus and my solicitor's a Maronite".
Authoritatively overheard was Dr Paisley railing against Mr Mitchell as "the man who's going to study the souls of the participants and make a spiritual assessment".
Mr Seamus Mallon frowned upon the antics of the media manipulators. "Whatever stunts are pulled will rebound on those who pull those stunts", he warned.
At lunchtime, the contenders detached their nails from the starting blocks and went to dine in a prefab on roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, vegetable crepes with mornay sauce, or goujons of plaice. Perhaps appropriately, there was lemon cheesecake for dessert.
It was a day that could have done with more solemnity an occasion that was, as Mr Major said, "in many senses just the end of the beginning". An awful lot of people had predicted that they would never even get to this stage, he pointed out.
There will be another beginning this morning, amid mutterings that if the process remains bogged down the governments will have no alternative bat to take "executive action".
Bout Senator Mitchell, who has bowed out gracefully for the moment to allow the rhetoric and theatricals to exhaust their incandescence, has yet to show his hand. Then and only then can a verdict be pronounced on whether sense can be salvaged from nonsense.