EXPOSITION OF 1867. 
873 
State governments and individual exMbitors were the respon- 
• sible parties. Scarcely anything, or anybody reported in time. 
The engine that was to operate our machinery in the nave was 
behind, and a French engine had to be contracted for. Car¬ 
loads, I may properly say ship-loads, of goods that should have 
been at Paris by the first of March did not arrive until the 
middle of April. And not a few exhibitors who were per¬ 
sistent and unyielding in their demands for large amounts of 
space, which was reserved for them accordingly, sent nothing 
at all. 
THE OPENING OF THE EXHIBITION. 
All too soon, the first day of April had come, but with it 
had come a degree of preparation that could not have been an¬ 
ticipated twenty-four hours before. Monsieur Alphand and 
his thousands of workmen had not labored in vain. Some¬ 
thing like order had come out of chaos ; and although it would 
require a full month more to put the Palace and Park in per¬ 
fect order, the condition was such as to make it better to open the 
I ■- 
exhibition according to programme than to postpone it as some 
advised. The Emperor was ready, and the day to which the 
whole world had looked forward for three years had come. If 
the nations were not ready let the reproach be upon their own 
heads. During the day previous and the night that followed, 
there had been erected a royal entrance and a grand covering 
for the Imperial approach from the Bridge Jena to the Palace, 
by the erection of handsome bronzed posts, some seventy feet 
in height, with gilded points, and a broad rich vellum of green 
cloth sprinkled with the Napoleonic bees of gold. The posts 
were decorated at the summit with gay streamers, and beneath 
the vellum, (which had a breadth of about 50 feet and a hight 
of 40 feet,) with beautiful representations of the imperial 
standard. The inimitable crystal pavilion outside the Palace, 
as a resting place for the imperial family on occasion of their 
visits, had put on a superlative beauty and gayety, and the nu¬ 
merous trophies and pavilions in the nave and elsewhere with¬ 
in the Palace, had commanded the skill of the best masters for 
