He’d already been struck by the motor cars in the street—there were not many among the horse-drawn vehicles, but certainly more than one saw in the provinces. More surprising was the presence of the Métro. For if Paris had been slow to adopt underground trains, when it finally happened, the network grew fast. Above all, he’d been struck by the elegance of the serpentine, Art Nouveau entrances to the Métro that appeared down all the boulevards. They were really very pleasing.

He soon found a cab, and told the driver to continue a little way along the Seine, until they were level with Les Invalides. For there were three more additions to the city he could look at as they passed. The first was a bridge.

The Pont Alexandre III had also been completed while he was away. Named for the recent Russian tsar who’d become France’s ally against German aggression, it was a flamboyant affair, a pair of golden winged horsemen supported on pillars at each end, and other emblems linking Paris with St. Petersburg. It might be a little gaudy, Roland thought, but on the whole it was magnificent.

Immediately across the bridge he encountered the other two. On his left, the Grand Palais, and on his right, the Petit Palais.

If the great fair of 1889 had bequeathed Paris the Eiffel Tower, the next fair at the turn of the century had left these two magnificent pavilions. A facing pair of exhibition halls that started as handsome stone museums and, as they rose, turned into soaring Art Nouveau glass houses. They were like opera houses made of glass, he thought, and flanking the short avenue to the new bridge, with the trees of the Champs-Élysées just behind them, their setting couldn’t have been more delightful.

The cab turned into the Champs-Élysées. Moments later they were at the Place de la Concorde, turning up to La Madeleine, and there was Maxim’s on the left.

Maxim’s: It had been a struggling new bistro the only time that Roland had been there before, back in the nineties. But now it was a palace.

The location, of course, had helped. Set in the broad street between the Place de la Concorde and La Madeleine, it lay at the very epicenter of the city for the rich Parisian or visitor alike. Its facade was discreet. But it had been the transformation of the interior that had raised Maxim’s to the height of fashion. And as he entered, Roland was astonished.