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By Root 2073 0

the glass-roofed Grand Palais, and the pretty pink Petit Palais. But it had the idiosyncratic metaphysical charm of all meticulous human reconstructions of reality, a charm we associate with the miniature, toy theatres, puppet booths, doll’s houses, oilskin battlefields with miniature lead armies deployed around inch-high forests and hillocks. It had the recessive pleasing infinity of the biscuit tin painted on the biscuit tin. It was forward-looking, containing new machines and weapons, and images of craftsmen, clearly enjoying their work. It contained a reconstruction of mediaeval Paris, with troubadours and taverns, picturesque beggars, and ladies in bumrolls. There were new facilities—plentifully scattered different public conveniences, from the basic to the luxurious with running water and towels, telephone kiosks, moving staircases and a moving pavement, travelling at three different speeds. There was a palace of mirrors, and a complete fake Swiss village, complete with waterfall, peasants, mountains and cows. Along the left bank of the Seine were the palaces of the nations, some with mediaeval towers, some baroque or rococo. The USA provided telegrams, iced water and Stock Exchange prices for businessmen away from home. The Kaiser himself had supervised the napery, glassware, silver and china in the restaurant of the German pavilion. He had also sent a collection of the complete range of Prussian military uniforms. The Italians had reconstructed St. Mark’s Cathedral. The British had commissioned Edwin Lutyens to make a perfect replica of a Jacobean country house, which they then filled with paintings by Burne-Jones and Watts, and furniture and hangings by Morris & Co.

There was a Palace of Electricity, with a Tower of Water in front of it, a hall of dynamos and a hall containing hundreds of new automobiles, in every shape and size. The Tyrolean Castle was juxtaposed with the Pavilion of Russian Alcohol, the Palace of Optics and the Palace of Woman, next to the pretty sugar comfit-box Palace of Ecuador, which was to serve later as a municipal library in Guayaquil. In the Place de la Concorde, where you bought your tickets, stood the astounding and unloved Porte Binet—a monumental gateway, like something out of The Arabian Nights, decorated with polychrome plaster and mosaic, studded all over with crystal cabochons. It was flamboyantly artificial but was based on living forms in nature, the vertebra of a dinosaur, the cell-structure of beehives, the opercules of madrepores. On top of it stood a monstrous effigy of a woman—La Parisienne, huge-bosomed and fifteen feet tall, modelled on Sarah Bernhardt and dressed in a negligee or a dressing-gown designed by Paquin himself. On her head she wore the crest of their City of Paris, a prow, like a peaked tiara. She was generally disliked and jeered at.

The two largest exhibits in the whole Exposition were Schneider-Creusot’s long-range cannon and Vickers-Maxim’s collection of rapid-fire machine guns. The Kaiser had not been invited to his, or any other, sumptuous displays. His advisers and the French hosts were both afraid that he would say something disconcerting or incendiary. If British troops were killing Boers, the Germans were engaged in combat, in the outside world, with the Chinese. The Kaiser had reprimanded Krupp for equipping Chinese forts with cannon that fired on German gunboats. “This is no time when I am sending my soldiers to battle against the yellow beasts to try to make money out of so serious a situation.”

The Chinese, despite murder, rebellion and war, had nevertheless constructed an elegant and expensive pavilion in the shining Parisian microcosm. It was carved in dark red wood, with jade-green tiles and pagoda roofs, and an elegant tea-room. It stood in the exotic section, side by side with a Japanese pagoda and an Indonesian theatre.

Art Nouveau, the New Art, was paradoxically backward-looking, flirting with the Ancient of Days, the Sphinx, the Chimera, Venus under the Tannenberg, Persian peacocks, melusines and Rhine maidens, along with hairy-legged