Bagatelle Garden was perhaps spared serious damage because it lay in a forest on the outskirts and lacked Versailles's fame. Most places could be put back into use after a little tidying.
The Rose Garden was the most famous part of the estate. Those who had come to loot it had no interest in the roses, which had grown freely and were now tangled with thorns, forming a "wall" instead.
Perhaps the roses would bloom after a while and look beautiful then, but Georgiana did not know whether she would live to see it.
She came to the racecourse outside the Rose Garden. It too was overgrown with weeds, yet the land was clearly flat and well suited to serve as a flood diversion area.
She gazed out at the islands in the Seine, just as the people on Grande Jatte Island gazed at the scenery on the opposite bank from their island.
Before Javert—no, Lépine—reformed the French police, detectives had no concept of preserving crime scenes. They preferred guesswork, intuition, and finding eyewitnesses over scientific and professional methods such as fingerprint matching and tire-track analysis.
There was no way to trace the origin of the Metatron's Cube found at Place de Grève.
At the current pace of construction on Rue de Rivoli, it might take another two or three years to reach that area, provided no other factors interfered.
The construction of the Ourcq Canal could theoretically create many jobs, including for able-bodied retired veterans, but they could not do this kind of work, even though digging a canal was essentially not much different from digging trenches.
Even the Irish had been unwilling to dig trenches in Crimea, though digging trenches and building fortifications could at least waste time and keep them from risking their lives on the battlefield.