Paris: The Novel (34 page)

“You didn’t say it, but it’s the truth.”

She didn’t answer.

“Tell me,” he asked, “are you going to live your entire life under the thumb of Monsieur Ney?”

“He employs Aunt Adeline.”

“To help him steal money from a lot of helpless old women?”

“No.”

“Yes. That’s what he’s doing. And if you spend your life working for him, that’s what you’ll be doing.”

“You think you know everything, but you don’t.”

“You think he’s going to look after you? You think he’s going to look after your aunt? I’ll tell you how she’ll finish up. Like Mademoiselle Bac.”

“You don’t understand,” Édith suddenly cried out. “At least Mademoiselle Bac has a roof over her head.”

He shrugged.

“I’d sooner be in the gutter.”

“You probably will be. My aunt’s right. You’re a fool.” She got up. “I have to go now.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I have to go.”

So Thomas sat there feeling very angry, and it did not occur to him that when she was twenty yards down the street Édith had burst into tears.

That winter seemed long to Thomas Gascon. He was high above the Paris rooftops now, on the cold, iron tower. As he gazed down, gray day after gray day, the winter trees by the building site, and the long sweep of the Seine, looked bare and sad.

The work was hard. When the creeper cranes raised each section of the iron framework into place, the workmen swarmed over it. The sections came from the factory held together with temporary bolts, all of which had to be replaced with rivets.

It took a gang of four to rivet. First, the apprentice heated the rivet in a brazier until it was almost white hot, and swollen. The holder, wearing thick leather gloves, picked the rivet up with a pair of tongs and fitted it into the hole that was perfectly aligned between the metal girders or plates to be joined; then he’d block it in place with a heavy metal counterweight while the first of the two strikers would use a hammer to fashion a broad head on the other end of the rivet. Last, a second striker with a heavy sledgehammer would hammer the rivet down. As the hammered rivet cooled and shrank, it would grip the metal plates together tighter and tighter, finally exerting a force of three tons.

Each team had its own particular hammering sound, so that the men themselves could often tell without looking exactly who was working at any given moment.

The work was intense, and come rain, sleet or snow, it went on, eight hours a day.

Thomas was a striker. He usually liked to work with open-finger gloves, warming his hands from time to time with the heat from the fires used to heat the rivets. But he was obliged to abandon them for leather gloves, and often his fingers were numb. When the wind got up, it lashed his body as mercilessly as it would a sailor up a mast.

Early in the new year, however, the work of the flyers changed. For now they began to construct the tower’s massive platform.

To Thomas, this felt quite strange. It was as if, building a table, he had suddenly moved from the vertical confines of the leg to the vast horizontal space of the tabletop.

“It’s more like building a house,” he remarked. A house in the sky, to be sure—or rather, an enormous apartment block, constructed of iron.

The base of the platform was nearly two hundred feet in the air. In the central pit underneath, a huge square of scaffolding rose from the ground like a tree trunk, with branches spreading out to the underside of the platform’s edge, so that away from the platform’s center, he was still looking down at an almost uninterrupted vertical drop. But he noticed that, since his eye was constantly led to look across the growing horizontal floor of the platform, he was hardly aware of the chasm below.

Structurally, Thomas well understood, it was this platform that bound the four great pillar stacks together and would provide the base for the soaring tower above. But even so, as the work progressed, he was astounded by the scale of the thing. The walk around the side galleries, from which there were fine views of Paris, was over three hundred yards long. There was space for numerous rooms, including a large restaurant.

This huge band of hollow space was carefully locked into place. It was, as Eiffel had foreseen, a mighty task, and it took time. It was not until March that, having finally checked that the basic structure of his four-legged table was solid and perfectly level that Eiffel gave the order: “Proceed upward.”

Yet as the creeper cranes began their journey up the pylons again, Thomas noticed something else.

It seemed to him that the tower must be falling behind schedule. Eiffel’s assistant engineers would sometimes be fretful. Thomas would see them shaking their heads. He knew from the drawings he’d seen that the massive span between the ground and the platform was to be finished with an elegant semicircular arch across the outside edge. Yet as April wore on and the pylons climbed into the sky above the platform, the whole underside
of the tower looked a mess. But whatever was passing in his mind, Eiffel himself was always calm, polite, serene.

Only once did Thomas see Monsieur Eiffel angry. It was during the lunchtime break, one day in May. Eiffel was standing alone, near the northwestern foot of his tower, reading a newspaper. Suddenly Thomas saw the engineer crumple his paper and slap it furiously against his side. Then, seeing Thomas watching him, he beckoned him over.

“Do you know why I am angry, young Gascon?” It was evident that he needed to get something off his mind.

“Non, monsieur.”

“They do not like my tower. Some of the greatest names in France hate it: Garnier, who built the Paris Opéra, Maupassant the writer, Dumas, whose father wrote
The Three Musketeers
. There have even been petitions against it. Do you know people who hate it?”

“
Oui, monsieur
. Madame Govrit de la Tour told me I should not work on it.”

“There you are. They even try to subvert my workmen. But this article in the newspaper today, young Gascon, surpasses everything. It says that my tower is indecent. That it will be nothing but a great phallus in the sky.”

Thomas didn’t know what to say, so he shook his head.

“What is the greatest threat to a tall structure, young Gascon? Do you know?”

“Its weight, I suppose, monsieur.”

“No. Not really. It’s the wind. The reason my tower has the shape it has, the reason it is constructed the way it is, all this is because of the wind, whose force would otherwise tear it down. That is the reason. Nothing else.”

“Is that why it is just iron girders, so the wind can blow through?”

“Excellent. It is an open lattice construction, so that the wind can blow clean through it. And despite the fact that it is made of iron, which is strong, it is actually very light. If you put the tower in a cylindrical box, as a bottle of wine is sometimes sold, the air contained in the box would be almost as heavy as the metal tower itself. Amazing, but true.”

“I would never have imagined that,” Thomas confessed.

“But even this is not the point. The shape of the structure, its slender curve, is purely mathematical. The stress of the structure exactly equalizes that of the wind, from any direction. That is the reason for its form.”
He shook his head. “The arts and literature are the glories of the human spirit. But all too often, those who practice them have little understanding of mathematics, and none of engineering. They see a phallus, with their superficial eye, and think that they have understood something. But they have understood nothing at all. They have no idea of how things work, of the true structure of the world. They are not capable of perceiving that, in truth, this tower is an expression of mathematical equations and structural simplicity far more beautiful than they could even imagine.” He looked down at the crumpled newspaper in disgust.

“Oui, monsieur,”
said Thomas, feeling that, even if he did not understand the mathematics of the tower, at least he was building it.

“You’d better go,” said Eiffel. “If you are late, tell Compagnon that it was my fault and that I send my apologies. It’s not as if,” he murmured to himself, “I want the building delayed any more than it already is.”

By the time Thomas got back to his station, he was a minute late. Passing Jean Compagnon, he began to explain, but the foreman waved him on.

“I saw you with Eiffel. He likes to talk to you.” He shook his head. “God knows why.”

Since their parting the previous November, Thomas had hardly seen Édith. Once in December, and again at the turn of the year, he had deliberately encountered her outside the lycée, but each time she’d made it clear that she didn’t want to see him anymore. After that, he’d avoided the lycée, and although he would occasionally catch sight of her in Passy, they hadn’t met.

Since he spent every Sunday with them now, it was clear to his parents that he wasn’t seeing Édith. But nobody said anything. Once Luc asked him what had happened to her, and Thomas replied that it was over.

“Are you sad?” Luc asked.

“Oh,” Thomas replied with a shrug, “it just didn’t work out.”

Luc said nothing.

As spring began, he had thought about looking for another woman. But so far he hadn’t met anyone he especially liked. Nor did he have much time or energy.

During May and June, the work on the tower picked up more speed. The men were now working twelve hours a day. The great arch under
the first platform was accomplished, and the central scaffolding removed. Suddenly the tower began to put on a stately face. As the four great corner pylons swept up their narrowing curve into the sky, the next target was the second platform. At 380 feet above the ground, this would form a second four-legged table on top of the first. After that, the tower would soar in a single, narrowing fretwork shaft up to its dizzying height in the heavens. By the end of June, the second platform was already being built.

And this was admirable timing. For it was almost the fourteenth of July.
Le Quatorze Juillet
.

Bastille Day.

How fortunate it was for succeeding generations that when the ragged sans-culottes had inaugurated the French Revolution by storming the old fortress of the Bastille in 1789, they should have done it on a summer’s day. A perfect choice for a public holiday of celebrations, parades and fireworks.

“Monsieur Eiffel is having a party at the tower on the fourteenth,” Thomas announced to Luc. “Do you want to come?”

It was a bright afternoon. As they crossed the Pont d’Iéna, Thomas glanced at his younger brother and felt rather proud of him.

Luc was now fourteen. His face had continued to fill out, and a dark lock of hair fell elegantly down over his brow, so that at the Moulin where he often worked, the customers often thought he must be a young Italian waiter. Indeed, despite his youth, his years spent up there had given him a mixture of smooth worldliness and boyish charm that his older brother could only watch in wonderment.

Today, he had put on a white shirt without a jacket, and a straw boater on his head.

By the time they arrived, there were large crowds walking around the site. The lower parts of the tower were festooned with bunting, displaying the red, white and blue of the Tricolor flag. There was a refreshment tent and a band smartly dressed in uniform.