This Exhibition, we said a lot of bad things about it:
We saw too big:we will go bankrupt; the wines do not sell; the country has no money; foreigners won't come because of the Boer War.
I think the Exhibition, it was supposed to be a ridiculous humbug and a crash,” explains, in stunning English, in L 'Contemporary history, the heroine of Anatole France, Mme de Chalmot.
The presence of these wogs who disembark at all the stations, who walk on the moving sidewalk, or in the paulines and the tapestries with bells and sputters, says nothing worthy of the nationalists. Will the French people take the watchword from abroad? Will our luxury of such good quality shrink before a luxury of dubious origin? These exclamations in all languages, this mixture of blood, is the decadence of empires, it is the alteration of races, it is an offense to French virtues. Hermann-Paul, the Showman of the Dreyfusards, takes the opportunity to come and testify against his opponents:
THE NATIONALIST, to his wife. - Are you
having fun? You are not a patriot!
Or:THE NATIONALIST, - What is the pig that
speaks English?
And again:THE NATIONALIST. - With all these strangers. I don't feel calm.
Boni de Castellane speaks of the Exhibition as follows:
I still have the impression of a huge wound on poor Paris, which attracts the ugly flies of all the countries of the world...
Abel Hermant calls it a Cosmopolis of plaster. It is true that at the gate of Ternes Le Combat naval reassures right-thinking people. On a sea of eight thousand square meters evolves the French fleet in reduction, a small Gustave-Zédé, first of our submarines, a small Narval, model of the submersible which we have just launched, a Cayman, a Bouvines in miniature which attacked an enemy fleet, probably the English fleet, and sent it to the bottom of the water.
At the Exhibition, the Parisian admired, on the banks of the Seine, the red dome du Creusot, new field guns, shells. The Emperor of Germany can put water in his beer! As for the Queen of England, she is gagate. This Creusot pavilion exasperates the Dreyfusards. The Miss rushes to military exhibitions, says L'Aurore sadly, and to the big artillery factories:the cannons, huge rapid-fire guns, are the admiration of families; they come to a standstill before the plumes, the stripes, the scrap metal, the tinsel, the uniforms; poor beings!
All this luxury, these girls, these kings, this colonial apotheosis, this street in Paris, this triumph of commerce, this frenzy of large-scale industry, horrify socialists.
They look with a dim eye on the monomials of students, in velvet berets; the black crepe de chine ties that the youth of the schools tighten under the chin, and which barely allow a thin white line to protrude, pinned with a gilded eaglet, testify sufficiently to the anti-republican sentiments of the boulevard Saint-Michel.
It was then that a strange, crackling, condensed laugh sounded:that of the Electricity fairy.
As much as Morphine in the boudoirs of 1900, it triumphed at the Exposition; she is born from heaven, like true kings. The audience laughs at the words Danger of Death written on the pylons. He knows that it cures everything, Electricity, even the fashionable neuroses. It is progress, the poetry of the humble and the rich; it provides illumination; it is the great Signal; it crushes, as soon as it is born. acetylene.
At the Exhibition, they throw it out of the windows. Women are bulbous flowers. Bulb flowers are women. It is electricity that allows these espaliers of fire to climb along the monumental door. The gas abdicates. The left bank ministries themselves. look like Loie Fullers. At night, headlights sweep the Champ de-Mars, the Château-d'Eau streams with cyclamen colors; it's just green fallout, orchid spray. water lilies of flames, orchestrations of liquid fire, debauchery of volts and amps. The Seine is purple, gorge-de-pigeon, sang-de-boeuf.
Electricity, we accumulate it, we condense it, we transform it, we put it in bottles, we stretch it into wires, we roll it up into coils, then we discharge it into water, on fountains, we emancipates it on the roofs, it is unleashed in the trees; it is the plague. it is the religion of 1900.
Much ill is said about the Exhibition. but even more of the monumental door by which one has access to it. Yet it represents the most perfect expression of the taste of the time. It is the most beautiful of the fifty entries of this world fair.