Description
Book SynopsisThe novelist Paul Morand described the Exposition of 1900 in Paris: … a new and ephemeral city hidden in the centre of the other, a whole quarter of Paris in fancy dress, a ball, where the buildings were the masqueraders. To our childish eyes it was a marvel, a coloured picture book, a save filled by strangers with treatures. Masked in this swirl of colour and noise was an event for the political, scholarly, literary, and financial elite of all nations, an occasion for demonstrating the many preoccupations of the intellectuals of the age. Like all the World's Fairs of the nineteenth century, this was an opportunity for the awarding of excellence: the awards or lack of them could make or break an artist, craftsman, or inventor who offered his skills for judgment by the international juries; it was the arena where careers were launched or ended, fortunes made or destroyed, reputations of great firms established or ruined.
And in one major respect the Paris World's
