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At the Le Khédive cafe, owner Sid Ould-Moussa was told that the king planned to drop by and could he please prepare a table outside, with a chair for Charles — a history and architecture buff — facing the basilica?

The Khedive of Egypt, who "governed as a viceroy of the Sultan of Turkey between 1879 and 1914," gave the 69-foot-tall granite obelisk to the United States in 1881 to commemorate the construction of the Suez Canal.

That was how Fathy, 67, who also did not want his last name used, his wife, Mona, 56, and their three children came to live next to the tomb of Neshedil Qadin, a consort to the 19th-century ruler Khedive Ismail, considered modern Egypt’s founder.

Egyptian society, or at least its upper echelons, has tilted westward at least since Khedive Ismail, Egypt’s then-ruler, remade downtown Cairo with Parisian-style boulevards and European-style facades in the 1860s.

In the mid-19th century, the Ottoman viceroy, Khedive Ismail Pasha, built a network of elegant boulevards, imitating Paris, that converged on a space that was named, at first, after himself: Ismailia Square.