To signal the arrival of new “ladies of leisure” on the Isthmus, a code announcement was flashed along the railroad’s telegraph line: “langoustes arrivées” (“lobsters arrived”). And the women, like the labor force and the technicians, came from every part of the world. If there was one obvious characteristic of the so-called French years that would be misunderstood in time to come, it was this cosmopolitan quality of society at every level.
