Paris: The Novel

ran southwest, along the line of the dismantled customs wall, with the streets of the cityon his left, and the sprawling suburb of Batignolles village on his right. Occasionally a tram pulled by a team of horses rumbled slowly past him, but like most laboring men he seldom cared to pay the fare to go on the trams and omnibuses whose horses, in any case, hardly went faster than a brisk walk.
    After half an hour, he came to a line of smart iron railings on his left, through which one could see the green spaces of the Parc Monceau. Formerly a princely garden, now an elegant public space, the Parc Monceau was the entrance to an exclusive quarter. Gathered around its southern side were the impressive private mansions of the richest bourgeoisie. But its most charming feature lay up here, in the middle of the railings on the northern side.
    It looked like a small, round Roman temple. In fact, it was the old toll booth. But in keeping with its aristocratic surroundings, this humdrum function had been served by a perfect, domed rotunda encircled by classical columns. Thomas liked the little temple. It was also the sign that he had reached his destination.
    Crossing the boulevard, he walked northward fifty yards and turned left into the rue de Chazelles.
    A generation ago, this had been a modest area of workshops and allotments. Then small, two-story villas with mansard roofs had begun to appear. And since Baron Haussmann had started carving his great thoroughfares through the quarter, some long, six-story apartment blocks could be seen nearby. The project that Thomas Gascon was working on lay at number 25 rue de Chazelles, on the north side of the street, rising high above the roofs of the neighboring villas: a gigantic truncated figure, completed to its midriff, swathed in metal drapery and surrounded by scaffolding. It was so tall that it could be seen from across the Parc Monceau.
    It was the Statue of Liberty.
    The workshops of Gaget, Gauthier et Cie occupied a large site that ran back to the street behind. There were several big, high sheds, a foundry and a movable crane. In the middle of the site stood the huge torso.
    First, Thomas went into the shed on the left. This was the atelier where the craftsmen worked at long tables, making the decorative friezes for the head and the torch. He loved watching them work, but his real reason for entering was because the bald and corpulent foreman was usually here in the early morning, and he liked to say a polite
“Bonjour, monsieur”
to remind that all-powerful figure of his existence.
    This morning, however, the foreman was preoccupied. Monsieur Bartholdi was there. The designer of the Statue of Liberty looked every inch the fashionable artist he was, with his handsome, finely drawn face, his broad brow, and his floppy cravat tied in a large bow. He’d been working on the idea for years. Originally he had conceived a similar statue to stand at the entrance to the Suez Canal, the gateway to the East. That project had been abandoned. But then this other, wonderful opportunity had arisen. With a huge public subscription, the people of France would commission a statue as a gift to America, to stand beside New York Harbor, the gateway to the West. And now Monsieur Bartholdi had become one of the most famous artists in the world.
    Not daring to interrupt them, Thomas went quickly out of the atelier and entered the shed next door.
    If Bartholdi had designed a magnificent statue, a huge problem still remained: how the devil to construct it? The original plan, suggested by the great French architect Viollet-le-Duc, had been to build the statue around a huge stone pillar. But then the great man had died without leaving further instructions, and no one knew what to do. Finally, a bridge builder had said he could construct a framework for the statue, and so he had been brought in as the project’s engineer.
    The engineer had set about his task almost as if he were building another bridge. The statue was going to be hollow. Instead of a stone pillar, the central core would be a pylon of iron girders. The outer framework would be a huge skeleton of iron. And onto this skeleton the thin copper outer skin would be riveted. Spiral staircases inside would allow people to go up into the viewing platform in the statue’s diadem.
    The engineer’s plans also allowed the statue to be constructed in several pieces at the same time. Liberty’s right hand held a great torch up to the sky; but in