Champs-Élysées—"champs" meant countryside, while "lysées" meant "Elysium" or paradise. At first, this road had not been a road at all, but a damp patch of open ground. The regent queen, Mary de Medici, decided to turn a marsh and farmland outside the Louvre Museum into a tree-lined boulevard. Once completed, it was named Queen's Boulevard.
By the mid-seventeenth century, Louis XIV ordered the road expanded so that he could gaze from the Louvre Museum at the unobstructed sight of the sun setting over the avenue. Every year, in late May and early June, there were always a few days when The Sun was perfectly framed within the archway of the Arc de Triomphe. That was a magnificent sight even Louis XIV had never seen. Now that it was late June, The Sun was not quite so perfectly framed within the archway.
The Accademia Bridge in Venice, the city of water, was also a fine place to watch the sunset, though the scenery there was completely different from what Alessandro saw now.
For the son of a gondolier to come to Paris, it was hard to say whether he had gone from the countryside to the city. After all, Venice had been a major center during the Renaissance. At that time, the people of France not only copied Venetian clothing and fashion, but also their painting styles and techniques. The Renaissance in France had developed more slowly than Italy's, partly because of the Hundred Years' War between Britain and France, and partly because France's interior, apart from its southern region, lay far from the Mediterranean. Yet the metal movable-type molds used in Venetian printing presses had all been supplied by craftsmen from France.
When Nicolas Flamel created the Philosopher's Stone, it was just before Leonardo da Vinci arrived in France, when