“that vaunted slave of humanity”
Another example of using metaphor as irony. The slave here refers to the machinery in the paper mill. The irony is that it is the female workers who are the slaves to the machine.
Brian de Bois Guilbert
“Templar? That’s a romantic name. Let me see. Brian de Bois Guilbert was a Templar, I believe?” This quote is dripping with irony, but only to those readers as well-acquainted with literature as the narrator. The Knights Templar are famously iconic images of bravery and chivalry. The narrator is right that Brian de Bois Guilbert—a character from the novel Ivanhoe—is a Templar. He is also a character who attempts to rape a beautiful young Jewish maiden before plotting to have her tried as a witch. Hence, the irony.
Cupid
The name of the dimpled young man who acts as the narrator’s tour guide through the paper mill is ironically named. Cupid, remember, is the Latin god of love and erotic desire. This Cupid’s job is to overlook a crew of virginal young maidens in a place where only he and an old man work. This Cupid’s arrow, then, is not shot into the women to match them with the men into whom he has shot the corresponding arrow, but to create an endless love match between virgins and the paper-making machine.
The Temple of Anacreon
The narrator is persistent in his ironic referencing of the actual Knights Templar in order to juxtapose their modern day progenies as severely lacking in comparison. One of his most bitterly ironic comments on this gap is his comparison of these London lawyers to Anacreon with the query “do these degenerate Templars now think it sweeter to fall in banquet than in war?” Anacreon was a poet of ancient Greece primarily known for verse dedicated to pleasure of consuming alcohol. The ironic comparison of modern day Temple members to a figure so at odds with the image of the questing Knights Templar cuts deep.
The Solace of Domesticity
The apartment in the Temple Inn to which the narrator has been invited to dine contains furniture which the narrator describes as being well-suited to the solace of domesticity. This is an ironic phrase in the context of the setting as being off-limits to female. It is a male-only dominion which by definition makes any reference to domesticity utterly ironic.
