The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [148]
The American Henry Adams visited and revisited the Exposition whilst it was open, driven by a precise and ferocious combination of scientific and religious curiosity. He wrote a riddling chapter of The Education of Henry Adams and called it “The Virgin and the Dynamo.” He saw where the centre was, in the gallery of machines, in the dynamos. He began, he wrote, “to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross.” The dynamo was “but an ingenious channel for conveying somewhere that heat latent in a few tons of poor coal hidden in a dirty engine-house carefully kept out of sight.” But he found himself comparing it as a force-field to the presence of the Virgin, the Goddess, in the great mediaeval cathedrals of France. “Before the end, one began to pray to it; inherited instinct taught the natural expression of man before silent and infinite force.”
The dynamo that drove the exhibition was on the ground floor of the Palace of Electricity. At first it failed to work. In front of it was a Château d’Eau, designed to be brilliantly lit by a rainbow of light. There were tiers of fountains, like the fountains at Versailles, and the palace was covered with stained glass and transparent ceramics, surmounted by a statue of the Spirit of Electricity, driving a chariot drawn by hippogryphs. When all this failed to come to life, there was an uneasy black cavern, a gaping hole, at night. But workmen attended to it, oiled it, polished it, stroked it, like a beast being urged out of inertia. Adams was right: a bunch of fresh flowers was placed on the back of the cylinder as an offering. Its pulse was felt as it shuddered into life. And when it worked, it transformed the façades of buildings into rubies, sapphires, emeralds, topazes, and the dark cloth of the night into a tapestry of shimmering threads. The Water Tower ran liquid diamonds, shot with changing opal and garnet and chrysoprase. The Seine itself became a heaving, dancing ribbon of coloured lava, where variegated threads intertwined, sank, and rose again, changed and relumed.
Wonderful illuminated portals, curving like the vegetation of an artificial paradise, led down to the flashing electric serpent of the new Métro. The whole exhibition was encircled by a moving pavement where citizens could travel at three different speeds, squealing with amazement, clutching each other as they moved from strip to strip. There was incandescent writing in magazines about the “fairy electricity.”
The Palace of Electricity was set about with warnings. Grand Danger de Mort. It was a death without tooth, claw or crushing. An invisible death, part of an invisible animating force, the new thing in the new century.
22
Prosper Cain’s party had rooms in a hotel called Albert, in Montmartre. Cain had work to do—he visited the Bing Pavilion to study the delights of Art Nouveau, and the Petit Palais to look at the rich collection of historic art. He went repeatedly to the German decorative section, where the new elegance of Munich was displayed in rooms decorated by von Stuck and Riemerschmid, in their new young style, the Jugendstil. He went to the Austrian and Hungarian rooms, audaciously swirling with linear curves, round