Charlotte paused in the doorway and sighed gently. "You know, it was a military march, in fact, nothing more, the 'Marseillaise.' A bit like the songs of the Russian revolution. At such times blood doesn't frighten anyone…"

She went back into the room, and it was from there that we heard these lines emerging, which she recited softly, like a strange litany from the past:

Over us the bloodstained banner

Of tyranny holds sway…

And drench our fields with their tainted blood…

We waited for the echo of these words to melt into the darkness, and then with one voice we exclaimed to one another, "And Nicholas? The tsar? Did he know what the song was about?"

France-Atlantis was revealing itself as a whole gamut of sounds, colors, and smells. As we followed our guides, we were discovering the different elements that made up this mysterious French essence.

The Elysée Palace appeared in the glitter of chandeliers and the shimmering of mirrors. The Opéra dazzled us with the nakedness of women's shoulders and made us drunk with the perfume exhaled by the magnificent hairstyles. For us Notre-Dame was a sensation of cold stone under a stormy sky. Yes, we could almost touch the rough, porous walls – a gigantic rock, shaped over the centuries, it seemed to us, by ingenious erosion…

These perceptible facets outlined the still-uncertain contours of the French universe. This emerging continent was filling up with things and people. The empress knelt on a mysterious prie-dieu that did not suggest any known reality. "It's a kind of chair with its legs cut off," explained Charlotte, and the image of this mutilated piece of furniture left us dumbfounded. Like Nicholas, we repressed the desire to touch the purple cloak with its tarnished golds, which Napoleon had worn on the day of his coronation.