The dream fades away as hands touch him again.
He'd been with Baron Haussmann, and had seen his plan for the city.
It was magnificent.
He would create a modern Paris, a city of long, elegant boulevards and tall beautiful buildings. The cluttered, meandering medieval streetscape would fade away, along with the blood and the dirt of the Revolution. The thousand water fountains, used in days gone by to revive the hardworking horses would be replaced with sculptures and memorials to the victorious; to the Republic. The tracks leading right into the Ile de la Cite, the island in the center, once required to transport goods and people to the markets along the banks of the Seine, would be replaced with paved streets where ladies could stroll on the arms of their gentlemen, their dresses no longer trailing in dust.
His eyes flickered behind closed lids, shut fast it seems, for no matter how much he tried he could not prize them open.
More hands, this time probing his arms, his body, his head, even his eyes.
Voices fade in and out.
Odd words and snippets of disjointed conversations seep into his mind and lodge there uselessly.
The prick of a needle into his arms sends some sort of elixor into his veins. It awakens a memory of a similar sensation some time previous. Some point before his dream began.
The dream.
His mind reaches for the threads of it but ... they're gone. Haussmann and his grand plan have faded away.
He can hear the bleep and whoosh of machines.
He cannot move.
Cannot move one muscle in his body, try as he might.
His mind slips backwards.
It's 1889.
The Great Exhibition.
The city is transformed again.
The monumental structure of iron and air soars above the river bank. The tallest building in the world. Princes from Wales, Greece and Persia come to see it. Buffalo Bill does too. As do actors and actresses and wealthy tourists and well-to-do Parisians.
Trekking to the top, climbing the stairs one by one, all 1,710 of them was an endurance but the prize for success was the next thing to godliness. To look down upon the city, to trace the line of the Seine, to see boutiques and restaurants and churches from a vantage point only previously seen by the birds of the sky is nothing short of miraculous.
But to be there at night, when hundreds of gas lamps held inside opal glass cases are lit, when the beacon in the campanile shines the red and blue and white light out over the city, when the daily closing of the Exposition is announced by cannon shot fired from the top of the tower. Well, that would have been truly something.
He imagines Gustave Eiffel greeting Thomas Eddison, inviting him into his office at the tip top of his tower, just a floor beneath the pinnacle.
A light distracts him and scatters his dream again.
Not the soft, orange glow of the lights that illuminate the Eiffel Tower but a harsh white glare. It's all consuming and he can't focus, can't see anything but that white light as his eyelids are made to open of someone else's accord.
Another pinch. Another shot of the elixir into his vein heralds more dreams.
They come faster now, like a cinema reel snapping forwards quickly. Sounds accompany the images but they're not connected properly.
