Two revelations. Two undefeated peoples, of intense energy, of lightning and hitherto unnoticed fortune prevail:Germany and Japan.
The Reich Palace, under its rustic aspect, under the steeples of green and yellow wood, hides an explosion of method, of science, of labour; it's a huge practical strategy, the greatest business wrap ever.
In the streets of the Exhibition, the Germans are everywhere, great lords, professors with glasses, observers, traveling salesmen.
The older generation of French people. that of Renan, Taine, Claude Bernard. de Sainte-Beuve, had maintained the cult of Goethe and Winckelmann at the Sorbonne. by Lessing. of Humboldt, of Mommsen. but here is a completely different story, here is a country of docks, of industries. cement, steel, here is Germania 1900.
I hear grown-ups approaching each other:
Have you seen the Germans? It's prodigious!... There they put the air in bottles! They make cold!
And everyone rushes to the first experiments with liquid oxygen. We admire the models of the giant liners, the Deutschland, of Hamburg Amerika, which has just broken the record for crossing the Atlantic in five days eight hours.
American millionaires rent their cabins at exorbitant prices on these new leviathans invented by German designers.
We read on the transparencies that Germany suddenly increases its fleet of thirty-eight battleships and one hundred and twelve torpedo boats.
The Emperor sent to Paris, as a courtesy to the French, his favorite paintings:The Embarkation for Culière. The Ensign of Gersaint and The Actors. by Watteau.
tubular, this political boldness, this commercial impertinence? We knew Nagasaki and its lanterns:why Kobe and its blast furnaces? Against who ? Loti had said none of this.
These peoples who are making a new life for themselves, who ignore the end of the century, neurosis, degeneration, politics, who remain welded to their faith, to their tradition, against whom do they want to be great?
We rush to these masterpieces that we may not see again.
because it is repeated that the monk Hehnin predicted that William II would be the last Hohenzollern and that the new century would open with a great war.
Germany is not sticking its nose in its past; it brings an entirely new decorative art. of a certain vitality; French art was to suffer a profound blow from it; the day after the Exhibition, he freed himself from Pre-Raphaelitism to look towards Munich. in the name of synthesis, mass, number and cheapness.
All of Paris runs to the German optical section, to German precision instruments! And the fabrics of Crefeld and Elberfeld! And the chemical industries! And the laboratories!
And the Hanover stud farms! And-the retrospective of German uniforms since the 17th century! And the model lighthouse... Only Saint-Gobain can compete, with its eight-meter mirror. And the flag of the German navy... And that of the Berlin porcelain factory...
Germany even spills over into the Vincennes annex. No race has yet managed to return such products to the earth and the sweat of man.
The old gentlemen were transported in wheelchairs, among this heap of valves, steering wheels, regulators, and said, shaking their heads:
Our Exhibition is a commercial Sedan.
Everyone knew that the Kaiser was was busy with everything himself.
How big he saw! This European lion, as Marcel Prévost then called him, is rumored to have come several times incognito to Paris to watch his work, we even saw him dine at Paillard.
Japan seems to be the oriental echo of the great voice that sings on the Rhine a hymn to work, to the fatherland, to the war that ennobles. Would an entire people be able to die like Sada Yacco dies every evening under the chestnut trees of Cours-la-Reine?
After the gilded screens of the Goncourts. Mallarmé's fans, what do these armor plates, these boilers mean