Hard-Hearted

The Village Suisse had never had much of a connection to reality.
It had been conjured out of nothing to form one of the extremities of the vast theme park thrown up for the 1900 Universal Exhibition, which had colonised the banks of the Seine all the way downstream from the Alexander III bridge. As its name indicated, its first incarnation was as a full-scale diorama of an Alpine village, a clump of chalets lying in the shade of a custom-built rocky promontory, complete with lake and waterfall.