France's decision to take part at all, while its own soil was invaded, struck Todd as "the most courageous thing morally in the annals of expositions." Its pavilion was a copy of the Palais de la Légion d'Honneur on the Left Bank. That palace was built for the Prince de Salm and later became the seat of the Order of the Legion of Honor. The architect Henri Guillaume arrived with the plans on December 24, 1914. The building went up in nine weeks, five of them rainy, between about January 10 and the end of March 1915, finished in the fair's ivory "travertine" to match everything else.
Visitors passed through a triumphal arch flanked by double rows of Ionic columns into a deep court. There sat a cast of Rodin's "Thinker". At the back rose a portico of six Corinthian columns under the words "Honneur et Patrie" and two colossal eagles. The rectangular main building, 256 by 349 feet and about 35 feet high, held 60,000 square feet of exhibits, the most of any foreign pavilion. Inside were Gobelin tapestries, Sèvres vases, Napoleon's Legion of Honor carpet, relics of Lafayette and Rochambeau, rooms of Manet, Monet and Cézanne, Lalique glass, couturiers' gowns and a lingerie room. France also gave space to Belgium, which had no pavilion of its own: its paintings, lace and models of war-ruined monuments filled chambers here at French expense.
The pavilion was dedicated in its court on April 9, 1915. It was never meant to last. But Alma de Bretteville Spreckels won the French government's permission to build a permanent copy, and the result, designed by George Applegarth with Guillaume, is the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in Lincoln Park. It opened on Armistice Day, 1924.
