All these people have noble and serious faces, as in their photographs in the Mariani album. They are in evening dress, preceded by a wave of ushers in short breeches and silver chains. Sabers, helmets and top hats sparkle; we play Massenet's Marche solemn.
M. Loubet crosses old Paris, masterpiece of a great artist coupled with a great poet, M. Robida (the author of this 20th Century, published in 1883, which provides theater in three languages, l transatlantic plane, the newscast, television, Negro deputies, women lawyers, artificial islands and the explosion of Russia). It looks like the City, for the occasion, has advanced to the Quai Debilly.
He takes a look at the Trocadero, which has become an all-white Arab city, and goes up the Seine by boat, to the Alexandre bridge adorned with the emasculated lions of Dalou.
Ask for the views of the Exhibition!
The quays, usually so flat in flight, bristle with steeples, pinnacles, green cupolas, oriental domes. The cannon of the Invalides thunders, all nations have paraded. The smaller the states, the bigger they have done; Montenegro crushes the United States.
After having spoken of human fraternity, Mr. Loubet reviews the greenhouses of the City of Paris at Cours-la-Reine, the pavilions... Once again associating Russia with France!
These words resound under the porch of a large golden house, a sort of tabernacle, Turkish kiosk, iconostasis, similar to those palaces of the Thousand and One Nights which vanish as soon as you touch them. Above rises the two-headed eagle which, in one of its claws, holds a scepter and, in the other, a globe surmounted by a Greek cross:it is the flag of the tsar.
At this moment, the Russian ambassador is receiving the President of the Republic; Prince Ouroussov looks at M. Loubet; varnished boots look down on the sad boots with presidential buttons, the horizontal gold bars of the uniform of the nobility, strapped on green cloth, clash with the modest usefulness of an evening dress in broad daylight:the cap of Astrakhan considers the Auteuil hat without indulgence:one hundred and thirty million Russians look at thirty-seven million Frenchmen. Five centuries of autocracy salute twenty-five years of republic.
The prince has a great appearance, a great sword, great health; as the donors of the Orthodox churches hold between their fingers stiff with rings the monastery they are going to offer, so His Excellency seems to hold a very small France in his hands.
Around him, the copes and the dalmatics are living mosaics. The pope presents M. Loubet with bread and salt on a fine linen cloth embroidered in red; behind the pope slips, smiling, Mr. Arthur Raffalovitch, Jewish agent of the Russian Ministry of Finance in Paris.
Strange forced couplings, those of politics! Bismarck's brutality threw these two countries so far apart, best suited to ignore each other, into each other's arms. France has paid a big guy to defend it. The muzhik will defend it. but he can't tear his eyes away from the rounded reticle where the Republic holds its hoard. It's infuriating. those little people who always have money in their cupboard. and the Russians, who own millions of hectares, and who never have enough to beat the timber merchant!
This official world is neither beautiful nor funny:the champagne from the Elysée buffets makes Prince Ouroussov grimace, but you have to go through it:beat the French. it's cheaper than borrowing from the Jew. who will commit suicide a few months later, the Russian delegates, with extreme politeness, suppress a laugh at the sight of this tiny president, of these tiny bourgeois who never ride on horseback to pick up handkerchiefs between their teeth, who never walk on broken crockery, who ignore the sweetness of sleepless nights on the Islands, who never kiss their murderer, who never kill their father, who count in pennies and not in rubles, who never put in banknotes banks in their pockets, who rivet the day and not the night, who tremble before the workers, who never beat the servants and who consider the Jews as equals.