Everybody who is anybody in Paris is invited to a gala dinner tonight in, of all places, a metro station. This is not your ordinary, insalubrious hole in the pavement with drunken tramps on the platform but the Bibliotheque Francois Mitterrand station, the most luxurious (critics call it pharaonic) of seven stops on Paris's first new metro line in 64 years.
President Chirac will take an inaugural ride on the elegant, expensive, Meteor line at lunchtime tomorrow, after which its name changes to the more banal Numero 14. Passengers will ride free on Sunday.
Fulgence Bienvenue, the smalltown boy from Brittany who became the "father of the metro" more than 100 years ago, would be astonished to see driverless trains moving at 80 k.p.h (50 m.p.h.), twice the speed of normal carriages.
The Paris line is the first "heavy" underground track in the world to use a computer and video camera guidance system, and French officials hope that 30 foreign transport executives invited to the opening will be so impressed by their showcase 21stcentury technology that they will buy it.
Passengers seated in the nose of the bullet-shaped trains can watch the track speeding towards them, and it will take only 11 minutes to travel the entire length of the 7 km line. Like the trains recently introduced on the original east-west line, carriages will be connected by wide, flexible joints, enabling passengers to walk from one end to the other.
To prevent suicides, the tracks are surrounded by plexiglass tubes, whose transparent doors open simultaneously with the train doors. (About 130 people throw themselves on Paris metro tracks every year).
The Francois Mitterrand station, where tonight's dinner is to be held, looks like a ballroom, with a huge, amphitheatre-like staircase, granite-covered columns and high, vaulted ceilings.
Its architects said they wanted to build "the antiChatelet", referring to Paris's largest and most nightmarish station.
At the other end of the new line, passengers will enter the Madeleine station from outside the Fauchon gourmet food shop. Instead of the long corridors characteristic of older stations, they will descend through a well that filters natural light all the way down to the platforms.
The Gare de Lyon stop includes a tropical greenhouse that is watered automatically every two hours.
It has taken 10 years and Ffr 6.1 billion (£726 million) to build Line 14, time and money that critics say would have been better spent on badly needed infrastructure in the Paris suburbs. Trips between suburbs represent two-thirds of all public transport use in the Ile-de-France region, yet Meteor and the Eole railway line have gobbled up available funding. Officials now promise to turn their attention to rudimentary tramways for the suburbs.
