Chapter ThreeLokita and Serge galloped in an unfashionable part of the Bois de Boulogne where there were few social figures to be seen driving.
It was the Emperor who had decided to turn the Bois de Boulogne into an English Park and a number of the French thought that he had ruined what previously had been a wild Paradise.
Now, as someone had said ‘even the ducks are mechanical and the trees look as if they were painted on a canvas for the Théâtre Impérial des Variétés’.”
But there were still parts of it where neither the Emperor nor Monsieur Varé, his landscape gardener, had encroached and this was where Lokita rode.
With her cheeks bright with colour after the exercise she reined in her horse under the shady branches of a tree and, as Serge drew alongside her, she said in what was a
