When I returned to Paris, around the Exhibition was ending, the pasteboard knew me, the golden domes were fading away under those pearl-gray mists that Copenhagen porcelain had just made fashionable. Then everything disappeared. , the negroes vanished like those magicians of the Thousand and One Nights which was then republished, in a famous translation. Doctor Marrus. Backpack, I returned to class and twenty-five years were to pass before I saw again the Japanese pagodas, the Chinese sleeping cars, the elephants of Cambodia, the dust of Ségou.
The 1900 Exposition had been not only a success, but a boon. She had relaxed the nerves of the French after a dreadful drama, she had marked a truce, if not between parties, at least between men; the hatred towards foreigners, so lively in 1899, had somewhat dissipated; we had made acquaintance; placid as a gatekeeper, the country had watched trainloads of Iroquois, Muslims and Venezuelans pass by.
Never had Paris been more beautiful. We had retanned the Eiffel Tower. Lots of sales had been made, lots of fireworks had been fired, each exhibitor had received at least one of the forty-two thousand rewards dispensed by a far-sighted government, the wine merchants had done a brilliant business. The nation was not as betrayed as the nationalists claimed, as rotten as Zola's supporters claimed. Loubet had become popular.
He's very nice, very clean, and he doesn't spit on the flag when presented to him.
The advanced parties retreated. (This year was lost for propaganda, said a socialist speaker at the 1900 congress.) A monster banquet was to bring together at the Exposition all the mayors of France, in costumes from Armor or Arles.
A gentle convalescence was beginning:reassured on the outside, France would be able to indulge now, for five years. until the alert of Tangier, to left-wing politics, its cute sin.