Paris: The Novel

answered with a smile.
    Young Luc shrugged and said nothing.

    It was in May 1886 that the competition was announced. It was not before time. There were only three years to go before the centenary of the French Revolution, which was, as all Frenchmen knew, the most significant event—with the possible exception of the birth of Christ—in the history of humanity. It was imperative therefore that Paris have another great exhibition. And at the gateway, the Republic wanted something dramatic. Nobody knew what, but it had to be a structure that would make the whole world gasp. On the first of May, the city asked for submissions. And they wanted them fast.
    The plans soon started coming. Many were banal. Some absurd. Some structurally impossible. One, at least, was dramatic. It proposed a towering replica of the guillotine. This however was deemed a little grim. Would the world’s visitors really want to walk under a vast, hanging blade? Perhaps not.
    And then there was the proposal from Monsieur Eiffel.
    He had originally suggested the project some time before, but the city authorities had been uncertain. The huge iron tower he proposed was certainly daring. It was modern. It might be a bit ugly. But as they viewed all the entries now, one thing above all impressed the committee. After the complex construction of the Statue of Liberty, it was clear that GustaveEiffel the bridge-builder knew what he was doing. If he said the thing could be built, then he’d do it.
    All Paris had been following the competition. When the winner was announced, there were many protests. But when Thomas Gascon saw it in the newspaper, he knew at once what he wanted to do.
    “I’m going to work with Monsieur Eiffel on his tower,” he told his family.
    “But what about your job with the railway?” his mother demanded.
    “I don’t care.”
    They’d need a lot of ironworkers. He intended to be first in line.

    Sometimes Thomas worried about Luc’s character. Had he been too protective of his little brother?
    Luc had taken his advice. At school, he’d become the boy who made the other children laugh. Recently, his face had started to fill out, and together with his dark hair he looked more Italian than ever. He was clever, and worldly-wise. But it seemed to Thomas that Luc was also in danger of getting lazy, and soft. And he privately resolved to do something about this. It was part of his secret program that, one Sunday that October, he took Luc for a strenuous walk.
    The mid-morning sun was on the autumn leaves when they set off. Luc had looked up at the clouds scudding in from the west, and told Thomas that he thought it was going to rain, but Thomas had told him not to be silly, and that he didn’t care if it rained anyway.
    In fact, when he’d woken up that morning, Thomas had thought he might be starting a cold, but he wasn’t going to let a small thing like that distract him from the more important business of toughening up his brother.
    “I’ll take you somewhere you’ve never been before,” he promised him.
    Descending the hill of Montmartre and walking eastward, they crossed a big, handsome canal that brought water to the city from the edge of the Champagne region, and soon afterward were walking up the long slope to their destination. The walk made him feel good, and by the time they reached the entrance, he felt he had shaken off his cold.
    Though Baron Haussmann had built many handsome boulevards, his most delightful project was not a street at all, but a romantic park on the city’s eastern edge. The Buttes-Chaumont was a high, rocky outcrop,about a mile north of the Père Lachaise Cemetery. Formerly it had been a quarry like Montmartre, but Haussmann and his team had transformed it into a rural retreat in keeping with the spirit of the times.
    If the formal gardens of Louis XIV’s reign had given way to the more natural landscaping of the Age of Reason, the nineteenth century was enjoying a rich duality. On the one hand, it was the age of steam, iron bridges and industry. Yet in the arts it was the high romantic period. And while Germany had given the world the cosmic themes of Wagner, romantic France was more intimate and picturesque.
    They entered through one of the western gates. The winding paths led through glades planted with all manner of trees and bushes, many of them still richly colored. In the middle of the park a small artificial lake surrounded a high, rocky promontory on the top of which a little