The city had grown in size, too. The open fields that had once separated it from its walls were now filled in. More neighborhoods had been demolished and replaced with wide boulevards, sparkling with electric illumination. Thousands of chimneys belched smoke into the air, so that the streets were frequently shrouded in mist. Paris had become decidedly sootier, but also finer somehow, one of those grandes dames whose every wrinkle serves only to make her more resplendent. Women wore ostrich plumes, men wore monocles. Newspaper kiosks and Morris columns advertising the latest shows were dotted through the city. Men no longer relieved themselves in the gutter but in Moorish-inspired vespasiennes. At every corner, grimy street urchins were enveloped in some neighborhood conspiracy. And looming above it all was a great iron tower that seemed to have no purpose other than to proclaim the glory of the age.

Millions had come from every country to witness for themselves the wonders of the Exposition Universelle, a paean to the wonders of the whole world. They marveled at such modern miracles as an engine that ran on peanut oil, talking films, escalators, and a device that could record sound called the telegraphone. Intoxicated by the mood of frivolity and pleasure, they took river gondolas and electrified conveyor belts between carnivalesque palaces and specially built pavilions, panoramas of the world’s great vistas, dioramas of life in the colonies, the world’s largest Ferris wheel, a gigantic globe displaying the constellations of the night sky, and, in the Russian pavilion, a matryoshka doll as tall as a horse containing forty-nine identical versions of herself, each nested within the other, the smallest no bigger than a pea. On Sundays throughout summer and into the autumn, the crowds applauded athletes competing in the Olympic Games. More than just the Olympic motto, Faster, higher, stronger was the credo of a whole new century. And yet I could not help but be wistful for the slower, smaller, gentler Paris I had known decades earlier.

I took a modest room in a boarding house in the Sentier neighborhood and slipped into this human sea unnoticed. The Hippolyte Balthazar I’d crossed into was little more than a stage magician, a vaudevillian, a trickster preying on human frailty, but I was determined, with the resources I had inherited, to reinvent myself, even if I could not yet imagine what form my next metamorphosis would take.

While I waited for inspiration to befall me, I had a more pressing matter to attend to: I set out to find Mathilde, Lucien, and Édmonde. On a fine morning soon after my arrival, I knocked on the door of the Baudelaire Society on the Quai d’Anjou. It had changed little in the three decades since I had left it as Édmonde de Bressy. The door was opened by an unfamiliar man. I asked after Mathilde.

“Madame Roeg is not in,” he replied.

“What about Lucien?” I asked.

“Monsieur Roeg is not in either.”