by Jill Jonnes
Gustave Eiffel soon began to be deluged with all sorts of letters from the tower’s admirers. In one, a woman propositioned him, writing, “My request may seem odd to you but perhaps you will agree if I am the first to suggest it. I am not ugly or old, really, but capricious. I have a dream of spending one night at the summit of the tower that has your name. Would you do this for me? If you answer my letter, I will be in Paris on June 5th next and would come in person to make my request. I look forward to the pleasure of your reply, if it is not too much to hope?” The tower inspired not only such occasional proposals of seduction by mail but endless bad poetry, songs, polkas, waltzes, and a forgettable symphony. A poet who described himself as “ jeune, pauvre, inconnu,” sent along his verses, hoping for a patron.
One American at the tower’s pinnacle marveled at the citizens of many nations enjoying the tower: “a hundred Congo sailors, black as midnight, . . . Turks, Arabs, Chinese, and other less familiar nationalities, many Americans and many English, the whole clientele of a French school.” The tower’s public registry made for diverting reading: “When upon this tower, and reflecting upon its construction, who is not proud to be a Frenchman?” Or there was the wit who left these universally understood lines: “From the top of this tower in rapture I see / My mother-in-law only as big as a flea.” Le Figaro faithfully reported on various silly milestones. “Spotted at 11 o’clock,” read the May 25 paper, “a dog on the second platform. This is the first one to visit us. He came into our pavilion, but he did not sign his name.”
Eiffel tried to use all parts of the tower to advantage. Tucked away in every available space were tiny enterprises catering to the visitors: “Women selling cigarettes, men renting opera-glasses and selling souvenirs, and curiosity dealers installed in dense crowds among the iron bars and stairs near the lifts that were forever moving up and down, and whose chains moved with a dull and regular sound like the noise of a machine. It was like a city hanging in the rigging of an immense steamer. The wind gusts came fresh and sharp like the sea breeze; one might take the sky, seen through the iron bars, for the perspective of the endless ocean.”
The tower’s sheer enormity and complexity, its many levels, the constantly moving elevators, the excited crowds, the delicious smells wafting from the crowded restaurants, the many little souvenir and snack stalls, the busy editing and publishing of Le Figaro, all combined to create an atmosphere of exhilaration. Eiffel was gratified to see how people wished to experience his tower, to be part of something so new, so gargantuan, so modern, which he viewed as an affirmation of technology, of progress. The reporters at Le Figaro had become enamored of the young female help at the Alsatian restaurant, and liked to see these young women each morning chattering away while peeling radishes and cutting asparagus for salads, a lovely sight in their colorful hair ribbons and traditional costumes. An enterprising lark even established a nest on the tower.
On Monday, June 10, the English bank holiday of Whitmonday, it seemed as if all of England had crossed the Channel en masse to visit the World’s Fair, including no less a royal personage than Queen Victoria’s son and heir, Arthur Edward, Prince of Wales. He was accompanied by his wife, Alexandra, the Princess of Wales, and their five adult children. For the French, the prince’s visit was especially gratifying, for all Paris knew that Queen Victoria had recalled her ambassador to France, Lord Lytton, just to make sure he did not attend this Gallic centennial celebration of monarchical downfall. Yet here was her own son come to Paris “privately” to tour the World’s Fair officially snubbed by his own government. The prince, forty-seven, a genial man known as “Bertie,” liked his amusements, hunting, and mistresses. His royal love affairs had tended toward famous beauties, such as Lillie Langtry, and celebrated actresses, including in his younger years that Parisian favorite, the inimitable Sarah Bernhardt. Perhaps Prince Bertie had come to the Eiffel Tower because he understood better than his aging mother the critical role that technology already played in the wealth of nations and modern power.
The Eiffel Tower, the Bolivian Pavilion (black and white), and the Nicaraguan Pavilion
The British royals, diplomatic entourage in tow, appeared at the foot of the tower at 10:30 a.m. The press wrote approvingly of the Princess of Wales’s rather simple lightweight dark blue and white silk gown and bonnet of black lace trimmed with lilies of the valley. Gustave Eiffel, along with his son-in-law, Monsieur Salles, and various French ministers and fair officials, greeted them (the prince spoke good French) and provided an escort up to the second floor, which was mobbed with the prince’s countrymen. With great difficulty, a path was cleared for their majesties to enter the Édoux elevator, specially furnished for the occasion with garden benches and foot-stools. Atop the tower, advance officers from the British embassy awaited. The prince and his family were aloft barely ten minutes, just long enough to admire the view and sign Gustave Eiffel’s new Livre d’Or, a handsome, oversize green leatherbound book with watered-silk end pages. The royal signatures featured impressive flourishes and occupied the entire first page. Theirs would be but the first of many illustrious autographs and messages to come, mementos of this summer when the Eiffel Tower was new. Later Eiffel would say proudly, “We gave the monarchies the spectacle of democracy happy by virtue of its own effort.”
Safely returned to the second platform, the British royal party was steered to the Figaro’s pavilion, where the prince spied the paper’s Guide Bleu to Paris and expressed an interest in having one. As the editors inscribed the guidebook, the prince and his entourage were already being swept away toward the elevator. A daring reporter tossed the gift volume toward the vanishing prince, who caught it, smiled, and waved jauntily as he disappeared into the Otis lift.
On that same most crowded day of the 1889 World’s Fair, American Susan Hayes Ward, a writer for The Christian Union, steered clear of the worst crush at the foot of the Eiffel Tower and instead walked along the Seine and through the History of Habitation, “an interesting group of buildings designed by M. Charles Garnier to illustrate human habitation from the stone and bronze age down to the time of the Renaissance, together with dwellings from many of the ruder races of the present day.” Bypassing the uninviting “cave of the troglodyte,” she lingered in the replicas of civilized dwellings from ancient times, including the “Egyptian house, time of Sesostris; Assyrian, 700 B.C., Phoenician, Hebrew, and Etruscan, each 1,000 B.C.; Hindu, 300 B.C.; Persian, 400 B.C., Greek, time of Pericles, Roman, time of Augustus.”
Even off in St.-Rémy, Vincent van Gogh had heard about Garnier’s clever homage to the architectural past, and wrote Theo, “I should so have liked to have seen an Egyptian house at the exhibition . . . painted in red, yellow, and blue, with a garden regularly divided into beds by rows of bricks—the dwelling place of beings whom we know only as mummies or in granite.” Meanwhile Vincent had also seen an actual announcement for the Volpini show and asked Theo, “Was that the exhibition you spoke of? What storms in teacups.”
Susan Hayes Ward was charmed by the History of Human Habitation, with its picturesque houses built and staffed by the “Esquimaux, Laplanders, Indians, Chinese, Japanese, Russians, Bulgarians, Central Africans, Aztecs, [and] Incas,” appreciative that “each house, too, is surrounded by appropriate vegetation; tea plants, bamboo and azaleas grow in the little Chinese garden and other sharp-leaved plants surround the Aztec and Inca dwellings.” In many of the houses, she sampled the native cultures, buying “Russian tea from a samovar, or Turkish coffee in tiny cups; baby canoes of birch bark, made and sold by Canadian Indians, Venetian glass, blown and shaped after ancient models under the visitor’s eye—each house has its own attractions.” She did have one complaint: “the modern American house, with its comforts, improvements, and conveniences, has been strangely overlooked.”
Ward then joined the crowds surging toward the Esplanade to see the nations that had become in the past few years part of France’s Third Republic empire. “The French colonies are bravely re
presented here; and the French people look with intense interest on these natives of their colonies living as if at home in this great capital.” The Vicomte de Vogüé, a man whose writings about the Arab worlds (Voyage en Syrie et en Palestine) had just earned him membership to the elite Académie Française, often rambled in these sections of the fair, passing an hour here and there observing the unlikely cultural encounters. He was charmed to glimpse “an African coastal king nibbling on Guadaloupian sweets at a mulatto’s snack stand” or a Vietnamese “Buddhist hobnobbing with a Greek priest.”
During another evening at the fair he watched four French female workers (all respectable) enjoying a late dinner when they invited three passing Arabs to join them. The men sat down at the table, declining, however, the wine and pork sausage. Then two black men joined the group and all chatted happily away as best they could, the embodiment of a new polyglot conviviality. De Vogüé could not know it, but he was seeing the future of Paris, a world city to which people of all races and religions would gravitate from every corner of the globe, above all from these new colonies, to settle and live, to seek education and a new life, ultimately creating a twentieth- and twenty-first-century Paris as international as this short-lived exposition.
But while de Vogüé was touched by such surprising mingling he was also concerned that many French, after encountering these new brown, yellow, and black quasi-citizens, were succumbing to unattractive “feelings of pride and domination not unlike that of the old Roman citizen on a day of triumph when he watched passing before him the conquered. . . . [The Frenchman] thinks, ‘Here are our slaves!’ Maybe this word is not spoken,” conceded the count, “. . . but you have only to see the way a fair employee or café boy treats these colored people.” Third Republic officials of course justified their foreign adventures and empire building as bringing civilization to the lesser races.
De Vogüé remained very much the skeptic. French officials were deluded if they imagined that their colonial “guests” marveled at “our grandeur, or would be inspired by our ideas. . . . According to those men familiar with that part of Asia, our Annamites [Vietnamese] are so many big children, amused by novelties but blinded by a prejudice like that of the Chinese . . . to see anything favorable [in the West]. As for the Arabs and other Muslims, long experience with these races leaves little doubt about how they perceive: the vision of our world stops at their eyeballs, which is to say, nothing penetrates into their soul; they will return home with a profound contempt for our customs.”
Where others saw only a delightful exoticism in these new colonial quasi-citizens, the count expressed a certain prescient trepidation. “All these exotic peoples, we must say, are now to some degree ours; they represent to us heavy obligations or great hopes. . . . Recent history suggests that we are in the process of constructing a colossal empire in these three parts of the globe. . . . Arab France, in north Africa; black France, in the heart of the continent of Africa, and yellow France, in the far reaches of Asia.”
With the Exposition in full swing, James Gordon Bennett decided his readers needed guidance to the many eateries around the fairgrounds, and dispatched “The Roving American” to report back to his countrymen. The journalist’s wife’s friends had insisted that the Austrian restaurant Kuhn served the fair’s best food, and so after a long search the couple located Kuhn behind the Folies Parisienne. “The inevitable Tsiganes musicians,” he reported, “were dancing about in their blue hussar tunics and scarlet trousers, and scraping away at their violins.” Orders for such classic national dishes as Wiener schnitzel or goulash produced blank looks. “Take it all in all the Restaurant Kuhn is not a bad place, but there is nothing Austrian about it except the beer and the name,” concluded the Herald man. Their check, reprinted in the paper, showed they had eaten and imbibed heartily for the rather hefty sum of twenty-six francs, including a franc to the orchestra. The next evening, “Roving American” visited the fair’s Russian restaurant and “found the tables very uncomfortable for a man with long legs . . . severe upon the knee pans and very damaging to one’s trousers.” That aside, he enjoyed his dinner of cucumber soup, salmon in pastry, and Zrazi croquettes, though he regretted the complete lack of vodka on the menu.
Two evenings later, the food critic and his spouse sauntered into the English restaurant near the luminous fountain. He noticed that the few French present “insisted upon speaking English, while the English and Germans and Americans quite as persistently spoke French.” He and his wife had oxtail soup. “The plates were cold and the soup was very watery. Then followed turbot. This was good.” His porterhouse steak, however, disappointed, being “pale, and rather tough. The waiter declared that it had been brought from England. If so, it must have been sea sick crossing the Channel. Not only was the steak poor, but the grilled mushrooms were very ‘soggy’ and ‘leathery.’ The grilled tomatoes, however, were good.” As usual, the check was shown and totaled: a pricey twenty-five francs.
In late June, as The Herald’s man was eating his way through the fair’s restaurants, the American Society of Civil Engineers, three hundred strong, visited the Exposition. They put aside their envy long enough to march en masse to the Eiffel Tower to pay homage, proudly ascending in the Otis lifts to inspect the tower’s every triumphant bolt. Their French engineering brothers hosted a midmorning breakfast at Brébant on the first platform. It was a proud moment for every engineer present, for their profession was literally building the modern world of railroads, skyscrapers, steamships, telephones, telegraphs, and electricity grids. And now here they were convened upon the long-dreamed-of 1,000-foot tower. Minister Whitelaw Reid was among the guests listening to Eiffel’s graceful speech, greeted with many toasts, hurrahs, and cheers. The Americans remarked among themselves how much Monsieur Eiffel looked like the deceased American war hero and former president, Ulysses S. Grant.
As noon approached on Monday, July 1, le tout Paris was not at the fair or the Eiffel Tower, but crammed anxiously into the Sedelmeyer Gallery on rue de La Rochefoucauld, a steep street in rustic Montmartre. Carriages lined the curbs for blocks all around, and even the most elegant gentlemen and ladies had trouble pushing through to their reserved seats. It was the much-anticipated sale of the art collection of Hyacinth Secrétan, the foppish speculator whose copper corner fortune had enabled him to buy hundreds of works of art, including some very famous paintings.
When the price of copper collapsed, spreading disaster all around, Secrétan had vanished, leaving only his spectacular art collection to make good his considerable debts. As all present knew, either a Frenchman or an American would depart today with the auction’s biggest prize: Jean-François Millet’s The Angelus. The air was electric with the prospect of an imminent cultural combat. This auction was about to reveal to all the world—and especially to the Americans—just how angry the French cultural mandarins had become about American plundering of Gallic treasures.
Aside from the Eiffel Tower, no subject roiled up as much ill will and trouble between the two nations as fine art. When it came to Americans and art, the French harbored mixed feelings. French masters were happy to have young American artists pay to study in their ateliers, and eminent French artists were delighted to sell their canvases to wealthy Americans, jacking up their prices accordingly. Meissonier, Gérôme, Bouguereau, Rosa Bonheur, to name but a few, had become rich through the munificence of American patrons. However, as the ranks of American artists in Paris proliferated and they aspired to exhibit in the yearly Salon, palpable resentment began to arise against foreigners taking up valuable French exhibit space. As one American painter complained, “In France, the American only has a right to learn painting. But he must not paint anything saleable or sell it when painted.”
At the Sedelmeyer Gallery, prominent among the wealthy and fashionable crowd was M. Antonin Proust, French minister of fine arts, impeccably dressed, his reddish beard stylishly parted down the middle. The minister was determined to outbid the Americans and retai
n Millet’s masterpiece. A childhood friend and longtime champion of the late Édouard Manet, Proust had been a major power in the organization of the Exposition Universelle. In that role he had suffered no end of complaining from French artists over who had been selected for inclusion in the prestigious official exhibition, how many paintings each could hang, and why this painting or that did not have a better spot. No truer words had been spoken than Proust’s rejoinder to it all: “The secret of satisfying everybody has not yet been discovered.”
But this morning, he had far more serious matters on his mind, for he had single-handedly raised four hundred thousand francs to secure the Millet, expecting any difference in price to be paid by the Chamber of Deputies to ensure The Angelus would hang in the Louvre. In Belle Époque Paris, where no métier was more hallowed than that of the artist, few objects were more venerated (or valuable) than works of art. And when artistic provenance included a dollop of copper corner scandal, all the better.
To the distress of the French, a good one half of those present for the sale were Americans, many of them absurdly wealthy. In recent years the French government had become sufficiently concerned about the art exodus across the Atlantic to dispatch an investigator to the United States. In 1886 he reported back, “I would never have believed, had I not confirmed it myself, that the United States, so young a country, could be so rich in works of painting, especially works of the French school. It is not by the hundreds but by the thousands that one must count them.”
