Paris: The Novel

staring out at the storm while the lightning crashed around them, their faces quite unmoved, he smiled to himself.
    The storm was coming swiftly toward them now, over the rooftops, over the canals. Luc called out that they’d better seek shelter, but Thomas didn’t want to. Ever since he was a little boy, he had loved the electric excitement of thunderstorms. He didn’t know why. The rain began to pour down on them and Luc stood under the temple arches in a futile attempt to keep dry, but Thomas stayed where he was, standing on a slab of rock, letting the rain pound on his head. The rain was coming so hard that he couldn’t see the park below. The storm was directly above the park now. A huge bang shook the air as lightning struck a tree not a hundred paces away, but while Luc cringed, Thomas kept his feet planted, testing himself, proving that a poor young man in workman’s boots could dare the gods of the storm to strike him down, like a romantic hero.
    Ten full minutes passed before the rain slackened a little and Thomas and Luc descended the hill and began their walk home. It was raining all the way, and Luc complained, but Thomas trudged firmly on, knowing that he must make a man of his brother.

    So he was quite annoyed when, the next morning, he woke with a sore throat. By noon, he was shivering.

    The illness of Thomas Gascon lasted many weeks. At first they thought it was the flu. Then they feared tuberculosis.
    When pneumonia finally set in, and a fever racked his body, and he became delirious, the doctor told his parents that he might survive, because he was young and strong.
    By November, he was past the worst; by December he was resting. But in January the doctor warned his parents that his lungs were compromised.
    It was his father who found an answer: a charcuterie at the bottom of the hill of Montmartre, and run by a widow he knew, named Madame Michel, who had a daughter. It wasn’t a bad place. Unwillingly, Thomas worked there through the early months of 1887.
    But he still dreamed of working on Monsieur Eiffel’s tower, and one February day, when the weather was mild and he had the afternoon off, he decided to go down to look at the site.

    The huge rectangle of the Champ de Mars lay about a mile south of the Arc de Triomphe, just across the river on the Left Bank. Until the eighteenth century, it had been a pleasant quarter of market gardens and allotments. But then a big military school was built along its southern edge, and the gardens running from the school to the Seine became a parade ground, and a site for great gatherings after the Revolution. The place had been made even more splendid a few years later when, to celebrate one of his many victories, the emperor Napoléon had ordered a fine bridge, the Pont d’Iéna, to be built across the Seine directly opposite the place. So the Champ de Mars had been an excellent choice for mounting the World’s Fair of 1889. People would be able to walk across the Pont d’Iéna to the Left Bank and then directly under Monsieur Eiffel’s astounding tower whose four, splayed iron feet would form the colossal entrance arch.
    Everything had been set. Except for one thing.
    Thomas remembered the day his father had come in with the news.
    “Your friend Monsieur Eiffel has a problem,” he’d announced. “The city has told him to build his tower, but they’re giving him only a quarter of the money.”
    “So who’s paying for it?”
    “Eiffel. He’s got to pay for the tower himself.”
    It was an extraordinary situation. To celebrate the centenary of the French Revolution, the city of Paris had ordered a tower and refused to pay for it.
    But if Eiffel was a great and inventive engineer, he now showed that he was an entrepreneur of huge courage and vision. “Give me the right to the first twenty years of the tower’s earnings,” he said, “and I’ll find the money.”
    So as Thomas approached the empty building site, he knew that before him lay not only the pride of France, but the financial triumph or ruin of Monsieur Eiffel himself.
    In front of Thomas now was a huge field of mud. The great 136-yard square that would be the footprint of the tower was marked by huge trenches at the four corners—north, south, east and west—where crews of laborers were busily digging.
    He started to walk onto the site to take a look. A man in an overcoat and bowler hat rushed over and told him sternly that he must leave. But after Thomas explained that he