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supervision of the Prefect of the Seine, Haussmann. At the Emperor’s behest, he envisioned and created new plazas and broad new boulevards and installed a much needed new sewer system. He turned a dark, tangled forest into the Bois de Boulogne. Medieval Paris vanished and what replaced it was much finer—never mind the carping of those who said Napoléon III was the worst of dictators, and essential freedoms were gone, and Haussmann had only made the new avenues broad and straight so that Imperial troops could easily rush down them to crush a radical rebellion of the kind which had terrified the bourgeoisie in 1848 and put it in a mood to eagerly accept Louis-Napoléon’s discipline. Those on the left used the term repression, but seldom in public.
    For those totally uninterested in politics—and Matthew Kent was one—Paris offered a different sort of ferment. The art world was in a continual uproar. Each year’s government-sponsored exhibition, the Salon, brought new assaults on the accepted and the conventional. The bemused public didn’t know whether to be appreciative of all the new forms of art being displayed, or outraged by them, and so held several contradictory attitudes at once. Thus the shockingly realistic paintings of Mart’s friend Edouard Manet could be denounced as “the art of democrats who don’t change their linen,” or it could be dismissed simply as “nasty,” while Edouard himself was treated almost as a celebrity. There were a dozen practicing painters who were intimates in Manet’s circle, or on the fringes of it. Matt was privileged to be one of them and to join their gatherings around the marble-topped tables of their favorite café several times a week.
    Of these men, some were dignified and some were just the opposite—like Mart’s good friend Paul Cézanne, who the critics said “painted with a pistol.” Collectively they were rocking and destroying the foundations of established art. They were throwing safe historical and religious and allegorical subjects into the dustbin and painting what they saw in the contemporary world. Peasants tilling a field. An audience awaiting a Tuileries concert. Or just the artist’s impression of a light-splashed dirt road in the country. Content was radical, technique was radical, and Matt thought it was the most perfect time in all of history to be in Paris learning to be an artist.
    Never mind that Bismarck’s ambition lay like a dark cloud over Europe, and that the Prussian generals were perfecting a new, lightning-swift style of warfare based on use of the railroads and the telegraph, two innovations employed for the first time in the American civil war. Never mind that behind the brilliantly lit façades of the public buildings lay seething slums where rats crawled over the cribs of infants. Never mind that angry proletarians held endless meetings in Belleville and quoted the first volume of Das Kapital by the journalist and social thinker Marx, or the older but not much less radical pamphlets of Proudhon attacking the concept of private property. The poverty, the fear, the rage went all but unseen in the festive glare of the lanterns and the shimmering gaslights. Napoléon III and his empress, Eugénie, had created a gaudy show to divert the attention of both the French and the world.
    But what was unknown to a majority in that last, lovely spring was the fact that the Second Empire had been created fifty years too late. It was obsolete the moment it came into being, and that it had survived for almost two decades was a remarkable piece of luck. Now, in Berlin and Belleville and across the world, forces were moving which would bring it down. Those forces would touch even the Americans who thought themselves safely isolated behind an ocean. They would touch even Matt Kent, who thought nothing could touch him except his two loves—his chosen profession and a young woman named Dolly Stubbs.
    Like the Empire itself, one of those loves would