Paris, France
Winter 1849
Snow continued falling over Paris while steam locomotives kept arriving through the night.
The Gare Saint-Lazare stayed busy even past midnight. Workers pushed carts through the platforms while clouds of steam rolled beneath iron beams and gas lamps hanging overhead. Men in heavy coats hurried across the station carrying luggage, engineering documents, newspapers, and crates filled with industrial parts. Conductors shouted instructions while fresh trains arrived from Lyon, Marseille, Brussels, and the northern industrial regions.
The city no longer slept the way it used to.
Factories burned through the night.
Railroads operated nonstop.
Steel mills consumed coal faster every month.
Paris had become the center of something much larger than France itself, and people could feel it everywhere they went.
The effects of the Mexican-American War still lingered even months after the treaties officially ended the fighting.
