The 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...