What a strange destiny to find oneself intimately linked to these people, to think that all their miserly money will be used to drink, to prepare, from the China Sea to the Adriatic, the great Muscovite expansion!
Yes, the money of these careful, tidy and hard-working owners will be used to destroy a Germany that looks so much like them - like them, courageous, upright, hard-working - for the benefit of something much more terrible than Germany. , the Antichrist, the Slav...
We have already seen strange political alliances:that of very Christian kings with the Turk, that of Louis XV with the Redskins, but never anything more comic than that of little Father Loubet with the Tsar of all the Russias. If the bear and the ant give birth, keep one for me!
The prince bends over the president and gives him the insignia of Saint Andrew and of all the orders of Russia with a beautiful autograph letter from Nicolas II. Caviar. Embassy footmen in short breeches and pink stockings. The Russian sailors are at arms in the war pavilion and M. Loubet is taken away to show him the Tsar's gift; this gift is a map of France in precious stones, which comes from the Ekaterinenburg cutting workshop.
This card cost four million. Paris is represented by a ruby, Marseille by an emerald, Lyon by a diamond, the rivers by a platinum wire. The map is placed on a large ermine mantle. Who will dare to say that France does not see its money again?
The French ignore geography. Geography comes to them. The Exhibition is a nameless confusion of time and space. Flemish chimes mingle with medieval bells, the songs of the muezzin with Swiss bells; Nuremberg, Louvain, the Hungarian dwellings, the monasteries of Romania, the palaces of Java, the straw huts of Senegal, the castles of the Carpathians make an astonishing international mixture under the gray skies of Lent. The dervishes circulate next to the Morbihannaises in headdresses.
Avenue de La Bourdonnais, you can still find yourself in the French section, but, in the avenue de Suffren, the electric trains, the Big Wheel with its suspended wagons and especially the moving sidewalk (Pascal's walking path, say our teachers, finally realized) and its three speeds take you to the Invalides, in the foreign sections, to the palaces of Mechanics, Civil Engineering, Mines, Liberal Arts, Metallurgy and well beyond, in the future, in the unknown, in the ether...
The strangest scientific discoveries come out of the ground; Paris is nothing more than an immense Palace of Illusions. At the optical pavilion, you can see - horror! -a drop of water from the Seine, magnified ten thousand times; further, it is the moon at a meter. There are tests of wireless telegraphy.
Doctor Doyen, this surgeon eager for publicity, even takes advantage of a recent discovery, the cinematograph, to show himself in the process of operating; his colleagues judge him severely. Elsewhere, the sounds of a phonograph are synchronized with moving images. The newspapers publish the photograph of the intimate Rostand family, listening to L'Aiglon in the first theâtrophone.