by Jill Jonnes
Not surprisingly the relentless scrutiny to which the construction was subjected produced regular rumors. In mid-January of 1889, The Engineer reported “a rumor that [the Eiffel Tower] had fallen out of the perpendicular. It is somewhat remarkable that this scare did not occur at an earlier date. . . . By optical illusion, portions of the Tower appear to have shifted from their proper positions. . . . The scare in Paris this week was so great that the Exhibition authorities were obliged to send their own engineers specially to certify that everything is alright.”
Journalists clamored to see the wonders of the Eiffel Tower close-up. Not long after Hugues Le Roux had made his frigid ascent on the still-swaying ladders, Eiffel hosted the minor literary lion Émile Goudeau, whose new novel, The Depraved, was to be published in time for the fair. By now the riveters were working at the very top of the tower, a confined and slightly surreal work-scene-in-the-sky, and when he joined them, Goudeau, a distinctive figure with his unruly black hair, wild beard, and crossed eyes, found himself almost nine hundred feet above Paris enveloped by “thick coal tar smoke” that hurt his throat, “even as I was deafened by the horrendous clangor of the sledgehammers. One was bolting over there; workers, squeezed onto a ledge of a few centimeters, took turns wielding their iron sledgehammers with tremendous force on the rivets; elsewhere black-smiths were calmly and rhythmically pounding on their anvils, as if working their forge in the village; but these smiths do not strike from top to bottom, vertically, but horizontally, and with each blow sparks spray forth; these blackened men, looming large against the open sky, appear to be tossing lightning bolts into the clouds.”
As the tower achieved its final shape, its early critics were grudgingly coming around and conceding its comeliness. “As soon as it was possible to judge the monument as a whole, hostile opinion began to relent,” wrote the Vicomte de Vogüé, whose constitutionals along the Seine had literally led him to new heights: he had received special permission from Eiffel to wander about the tower’s upper reaches while it was still being built. “There was in this iron mountain the elements of a new beauty, elements difficult to define, because no grammar of art had as yet supplied the formula, but evident to the most biased art critics. People admired its combination of lightness with power, the daring centering of the great arches, and the erect curves of the principal rafters, which . . . leap towards the clouds in a single bound. What [people] admired above all was the visible logic of this structure . . . logic translated into something visible . . . an abstract and algebraic beauty. . . . Lastly, the spectators were won over by what inevitably conquers everyone: a tenacious will, embodied in the success of a difficult undertaking. Only the top was still criticized, was adjudged unfinished, a weak and complicated crown that did not hold with the very simple lines. Something was missing at the top.”
Others particularly liked the top of the tower, whose summit ended in a rounded campanile. When visitors alighted at the very top from the elevator, they would step into a covered gallery. Fitted all round with glazed sashes that could be opened or shut as required, this penultimate gallery would be sixteen meters long on each side, and accommodate eight hundred visitors. Above this public gallery, Eiffel planned a series of rooms reserved for scientific purposes, and what would be the envy of many in coming months: an elegant personal apartment.
Above these rooms, at the tower’s true pinnacle, was the lighthouse. Reached only by an open-air ladder, the lighthouse was encircled at its base by a small, narrow terrace with a metal handrail. This terrace, three hundred meters from the ground, was specially designed for the anemometers and other meteorological instruments that required complete isolation. Crowning the edifice would eventually be a tall flagpole.
In February of 1889 an Englishman penned a pamphlet asserting that whatever the Eiffel Tower’s “merits, or otherwise, no one can deny that it is the greatest engineering work of the day, and as such it’s an object of intense interest throughout the entire civilized world.” Moreover, he was puzzled “why so much mud should have been thrown at M. Eiffel by part of the press, even if [the tower] turns out to have no further value. . . . Why call a man mad and a fool who has sufficient pluck and ingenuity to attempt something never before attempted? . . . It will be something to say you have been to the top of this enormous tower.”
Gaston Tissandier, the aerialist, was likewise puzzled, and wondered, “How many times have we not heard the remark, ‘What is the use of the Eiffel Tower?’
“A similar question has been asked concerning almost every new thing that appears in the world.
“In reply, it is enough to repeat that the iron monument was planned as part of the Universal Exhibition of 1889. In celebrating our glorious centenary it was desirable to astonish the world with some grand achievement, the like of which had never been seen before; and M. Eiffel’s project is justified by the success attained.
“But the edifice should not only be looked at as a colossal monument for the mere attraction of public curiosity. It is an experiment in iron construction of unusual importance, and on so large a scale that at the outset competent engineers considered it to be impossible. From it the engineer’s art has gained many valuable lessons to be applied in further developments. The Eiffel Tower is in a sense the pier of a gigantic bridge, which will lead to the undertaking in the near future of works of public utility, which up to recently would have been looked upon as simply chimerical.”
While the aesthetes had been finding fault with the tower, the makers of bibelots were cashing in. Happily exploiting the world’s fascination with this unique structure, they manufactured endless likenesses of it. There were images executed in “pen, pencil, and brush, in photo and lithography, in oil and pastel, on paper, canvas, on wood and ivory, on china, steel, and zinc,” not to mention Eiffel Towers replicated “on handkerchiefs and caps; it was eaten in chocolate and marchpane; formed into cigar cases and hand bells, inkstands and candlesticks; it dangled from the gentlemen’s watch chains and was fastened in the ladies ears; it stood in hundreds of forms in the shop-windows, and made all idle hands busy in the workshops.” When M. Jaluzot, director of the Magasins du Printemps, declared his intention that February of enforcing his exclusive monopoly to manufacture all such reproductions, the affected businesses threatened legal war, while the Parisian peddlers who found selling all these Eiffel Towers lucrative “came near making a riot.” The French courts quickly ruled against Jaluzot and any monopoly of reproduction, citing the state’s partial subsidy in building the tower.
With that, “the Eiffel Tower mania knew no bounds. Everything was à la tour Eiffel, from toilet tables and clocks to snuff-boxes, umbrella handles, scarf pins, and sleeve buttons. They were made to suit all prices and all tastes; they were sold on the street corners under magnifying glass for two sous, and they were built in the provinces fifteen meters high, and containing little private dining-rooms just as it stood at the foot of Iéna bridge, and everywhere on the globe the portrait of the giant was to be seen.”
Gustave Eiffel was understandably rhapsodic over the nearing completion of the tower and its embrace by the masses. He basked in the rising chorus of admiration and excitement, the contrition of many of his early detractors, and the hosannas of praise. The Revue Illustrée, which had featured him on its cover, had lauded this giant of engineering for combining “the practicality and methodical sang-froid of the English engineer, the audacity of the American engineer, and the theoretical science and taste of the French engineer.” Even The Times of London offered a mea culpa: “The form suggested the ugliest parts of a suspension bridge, and it was predicted that the deformity would be increased with the increase of size. The result has not been what was predicted. Even some of those who protested most loudly against the proposal now admit that the effect of the structure is not what they anticipated. They acknowledge that it has a light and graceful appearance, in spite of its gigantic size, and that it is an imposing monument, not unworthy of Paris.”
Gustave Eiffel (left) poses atop his tower during the fair.
Out in the boulevards jammed with omnibuses and horse-drawn trams, and in the quieter side streets of touristic Paris, French hoteliers, restaurateurs, and shopkeepers were waiting expectantly: they had heard Americans would be coming to the fair in free-spending hordes, as many as half a million. Perhaps Parisians thought Herald publisher James Gordon Bennett was the model of a typically profligate Yankee. “Their idea of the American,” confided the New York Tribune reporter, quoting the local press, “is that he likes to spend money, which may be true, and that he does not care what he gets in return; which also may be true, in fact.” Parisian newspapers were already counseling the natives against excessive chauvinism or rapaciousness. First, they urged, it was the duty of every French citizen to “conceal his natural antipathies” to the foreigner and “to treat him civilly, and to get as much out of him as possible. He should be made to pay well, but not too well. . . . The supreme art is to pluck the goose without making the creature cry out. . . . [He should not raise] his prices beyond what even the American will stand.” The Tribune reporter, contemplating the imminent mass fleecing of his countrymen as they came to the Paris fair to admire the triumph of the modern, offered a few words to the wise. “Every restaurant-keeper inside the railings of the Champ de Mars has sworn an oath to retire next November with a fortune.” Rather than paying exorbitant prices, they could seek out the Duval establishments, cheap and reliable. Or, they could be like the French and buy from the vendors outside the railings, and picnic.
CHAPTER FIVE
In Which the Artists Quarrel and the Tower Opens
On Thursday, April 25, 1889, James McNeill Whistler looked quite the dapper gentleman in his overlong black frock coat, white duck trousers, yellow gloves, and silk top hat as he strolled along the avenue de la Bourdonnais. He was heading toward number 27, the stately mansion that housed the Paris headquarters of the United States Commission for the Universal Exposition, handily opposite the Champ de Mars and the Eiffel Tower. Whistler adjusted the monocle firmly perched in his right eye, stilled the swinging of his slender Japanese bamboo walking stick, and passed the young Marine guard to enter.
At fifty-four, Whistler, his hair tousled with its trademark white curl, was still very much the witty troublemaker of the art world, a bantam of a man who delighted in provocations and feuds. Just the previous month, in his latest contretemps, he had slapped and kicked another American artist who insulted him at the Hogarth Club in London.
On this particular spring afternoon, Whistler was fresh off the Channel ferry and very much on a mission: he had come to find Gen. Rush Christopher Hawkins, the American commissioner of fine arts. Whistler held in his hand a printed circular that read: “Sir, Ten of your exhibits have not received the approval of the jury. Will you kindly remove them?” The paper was signed by Hawkins. Whistler was directed to a spacious office, and there found said general, a formidable-looking man of noble mien, who had been a distinguished commander of a regiment of Zouaves who fought in the American Civil War. In the decades since the war Hawkins had become a wealthy and famously irascible New York lawyer devoted to collecting art and fifteenth-century books. The general’s thankless but important job here in Paris was to organize the exhibiting of the American republic’s best art at the fair. The general and his compatriots felt certain that American artists, whether resident in Europe or back home, now had a thing or two to show the French, and a real prospect of winning medals and distinction. In the prestigious arena of culture, painting was America’s best hope for victories. There had been two American art committees working toward this end: one in New York, judging artists working in the United States, and another expatriate committee making selections in Paris. The two American groups would be geographically separate at the fair, as they were in real life, and their work would hang in adjoining galleries.
Whistler, however tiresome and eccentric he could be, was certainly one of painting’s leading figures. Raised in the United States and then St. Petersburg, where his father was building railroads for the czar, James McNeill Whistler had attended West Point, was ejected before graduating, worked briefly in Washington, D.C., and then came to study art in Paris. Fluent in French from his family’s years at the Russian court, he had a charming, resolutely bohemian, and pugnacious personality that was as controversial as his modern, impressionistic paintings. After witnessing some of his antics, his artist friend Edgar Degas had said, “Whistler, if you were not a genius, you would be the most ridiculous man in Paris. It must be very tiring to keep up the role of butterfly.” There was something in Whistler that relished notoriety and attention. Still, however many public feuds and fights in which he engaged, he was a serious artist who had won his share of honors and acclaim even while battling the considerable forces of reaction in art. For three decades now, he had lived in London.
“I am Mr. Whistler, and I believe this note is from you,” the artist now announced. “I have come to remove my etchings.”
“Ah,” said the general, nodding, “we were very sorry not to have had space enough for all your etchings, but we are glad to have seventeen and the portrait.”
“You are too kind,” said Whistler, “but really, I will not trouble you.” The general slowly realized that Whistler intended to remove all his work, and would not exhibit with the other Americans. Once again, the painter’s famous dander was up. (Some proposed that Whistler adopt as his hallmark the hummingbird, an American bird “whose daintiness and love of beautiful things are only equaled by its pugnacity.”) Later Whistler confided to the Paris Herald, “I did not mind the fact that my works were criticized, but it was the discourteous manner in which it was done. If the request to me had been made in proper language, and they had simply said: ‘Mr. Whistler, we have not space enough for twenty-seven etchings. Will you kindly select those which you prefer, and we shall be glad to have them,’ I would have given them the privilege of placing them in the American section.”
The domes, towers, and bridges of Belle Époque Paris
Whistler gathered his works and departed, leaving in his wake, as was so often his intention, ire and annoyance. What he did not mention in this brief foray to stir up trouble and retrieve his work was that he intended instead to exhibit with the British, since he was currently resident in London. Ultimately, there being even less space available in the British galleries, Whistler would hang only his large oil portrait of Lady Archibald Campbell and two etchings.
Several weeks earlier, on Sunday, March 31, 1889, the tower’s overall structure was completed. The pinnacle achieved a final height of 300 meters, or 984 feet. With the addition of the flagpole, the tower reached 1,000 feet. After five difficult years, starting from the moment Eiffel first admired the initial idea for a Tour en fer de trois cents mètres, it had been a relentless push to get construction under way and completed on time. Gustave Eiffel and his men had, as promised, finished in twenty-two months, in time for the fair. The day after the tower was finished, on the brisk, windy afternoon of Monday, April 1, 1889, Gustave Eiffel triumphantly welcomed to the Champ de Mars select members of the Paris press, along with his champion, fair commissioner Édouard Lockroy; French prime minister Pierre Tirard, a civil engineer by training and an early critic; the Paris Municipal Council; various high officials; and curious wives and children. The occasion was the formal first ascension of the tower, followed by a champagne fête for Eiffel’s men. At 1:30 p.m., 150 guests and all of Eiffel’s 199 workers had gathered at the north pillar stairs, while not far off, fair construction workers toiled away, racing to complete the vast, elaborate exposition buildings, gardens, and fountains.
Eiffel once again would lead the walk up the tower’s iron staircase, for even the simplest of the tower’s elevators, the Roux railway-like cars to the first floor, were not yet ready. It was still not at all clear if any of the elevators would be ready in time, but given that it would be five weeks until the fair opene
d, and that it was a day of such jubilation, did their absence matter?
As Eiffel waited to lead his guests, a politician who suffered from acute vertigo used a scarf to blindfold himself, and then clutched his colleague’s arm as they started upward. The group was lively and excited. The sun came in and out of the clouds racing across the sky, and at times the March wind gusted violently, whirling dust from below. Eiffel stopped not infrequently to explain this or that feature and to let the sightseers look down at the fair or up the Seine. When the party of one hundred arrived at the first platform, Eiffel indicated where the four eateries would be—an Anglo-American bar, a Flemish brasserie, and then a Russian and a French restaurant, each with five or six hundred seats. Most of the ladies in their spring silk dresses and the top-hatted gentlemen chose to go no farther.
But forty of the more intrepid followed Eiffel up the circular staircase to the second platform, more than a third of the way to the top. From this vantage point, these lifelong Parisians were delighted by the new panorama of their beloved city. The Seine had become a silver ribbon undulating through a miniature landscape. Most of them had never seen Paris from such a height. It was an exhilarating but somehow chastening sight. After their exertions and, for many, incipient vertigo, half of the group declined to ascend any higher.
