Paris: The Novel

finding himself back again in his family’s old mansion, in the great historical center of France, he could not help being struck by the mutability of the past and present.
    The ancestors who had lived in this house had doubtless considered England their traditional enemy, as she had been for so many centuries. Yet now all that was changed. Bismarck’s German Empire had arisen. France had suffered the humiliation of 1870, and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine. When he was a boy, who had his teachers at the Catholic lycée along the street told him were his enemies? The Germans of course. His generation’s duty? To avenge France’s dishonor.
    And who were France’s allies now against the kaiser’s German threat? The English, linked to France by the Entente Cordiale, together with the Russians, who feared the kaiser too.
    Wherever one looked in the streets of old Paris, from the ruins of the medieval walls to Notre Dame, to the bleak grandeur of Les Invalides, it was always the same story: Men called to glory, or to defend
la patrie
; men killed, in many thousands. The struggle for power, and, intermittently, the attempt to find a balance of power among the nations, until the peace broke down once again.
    Would his own generation do any better? he wondered.

    Luc Gascon was as good as his word. He came by during the evening with the address of Le Sourd’s workplace, a printer’s on the edge of Belleville, and even the days of the week when he might be found there.
    Roland set out late the following morning. His plan was simple. He would have lunch at Maxim’s. After that, he would go and interview Le Sourd. The late afternoon and evening he left open. If things went wrong, Le Sourd might have killed him by then. Or he Le Sourd. In either case the evening might be disrupted. No point in making plans one might not keep.
    Before he set out, he discovered a small problem. His service revolver was not easy to conceal. Although it fit into the deep pocket in his outer coat, it might be discovered when he took off his coat at Maxim’s. The alternative was to put the gun in an attaché case.
    But this presented a social difficulty. For just as no gentleman in Europe would be seen carrying a parcel if he could avoid it—there were servants, or in worse cases women, for that—even an attaché case, in the mind of Roland de Cygne, made one look too like a businessman, instead of an aristocrat. Had he been in uniform on his way to a staff meeting, that would be an entirely different matter; but he was going to Maxim’s for lunch.
    It took him several minutes to think about it. If he’d taken his own conveyance, he could have left the revolver there. His father’s jaunty carriage was still in the coach house, though without horses or coachman, and Roland had been thinking of buying himself a handsome motor car, a Daimler perhaps. But until he did so, he had no transport, so he’d haveto take a cab. Once he got to the restaurant, he’d leave the case at the hat and coat counter, of course, and with luck no one he knew would see him arriving with it. He wondered whether, after lunch, he could discreetly remove the revolver, slip it into his coat pocket, and leave the case at Maxim’s to be picked up later. For if Le Sourd by any chance killed him, the thought of the newspapers reporting that his body had been found with an attaché case was highly irksome.
    Yes, he decided, he’d try to do that.

    Yet despite the probably dangerous business that lay ahead, Roland was in a cheerful mood. It was a bright October day. He was happy to be back in Paris, and eager to investigate the changes that had taken place there since he had been away.
    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