It’s hard to know sometimes where the tipping point lies. Or what causes one event to happen rather than another. But, there’s no question les jeux sont fait, as Jean-Paul Sartre might have said, for my old colleague, Ken Jacobs, at the top of Lazard at the time of my May 11 column about the firm and Jacobs’ tenure as its chief executive. It was obvious to anyone watching that his time as the C.E.O. of the firm had to be nearing its end: He’d been there 14 years, during which time the stock had done nothing except go down 27 percent; he had just made the decision to lay off 10 percent of the workforce, something Lazard had never done before in its majestic 175-year history; and, to put it mildly, the troops were getting restless.