Champ-de-Mars, which was laid out about 1770 for the military school's
use as a field for maneuvers.

This field is eleven hundred yards long and just half that wide. It
occupies all the ground between the school buildings and the river.

Across the river is the height called the Trocadéro, on which Napoleon
hoped to build a great palace for the little King of Rome; but whereon,
many years after he and his son had ceased to need mansions made by
hands, the French republic built a magnificent palace for the French
people. This vast building, with its majestic gardens, was the principal
feature of the French national exhibition of 1878, which, like its
predecessor of 1867 and its successors of 1889 and 1900, was held on the
Champ-de-Mars.

Facing the Trocadéro Palace, on the Champ-de-Mars, is the Eiffel Tower
(nearly a thousand feet high) which was erected for the exposition of
1889, and has served, since, then-unimaginable purposes during the stress
and strain of war as a wireless station. The "Ferris" wheel put up for
the exposition of 1900 is close by. And a stone's throw from the
military school are the Hôtel des Invalides, Napoleon's tomb, and the
magnificent Esplanade des Invalides down which one looks straightway to
the glinting Seine and over the superb Alexander III bridge toward the
tree-embowered palaces of arts on the Champs-Élysées.

On the other side of the Hôtel des Invalides from that occupied by the
military school and Champ-de-Mars is the principal diplomatic and
departmental district of Paris, with many embassies (not ours, however,
nor the British--which are across the river) and many administrative
offices of the French nation.