Paris: The Novel

probably.”
    “We could meet for a short while, perhaps?”
    She hesitated.
    “I don’t think so,” she answered. “Everything is difficult at the moment.”
    “You haven’t time to see me?”
    “Not at present. I’m sorry.”
    “Do you want to see me?”
    “Of course, but …”
    He understood. He had thought that this was the woman whom fate had chosen for him. He had felt it to be so. Yet it seemed that his belief had been nothing but a foolish illusion.
    That was bad enough. But why was she rejecting him? Because her aunt didn’t approve of him. Because Aunt Adeline thought he was stupid. Because he had not shown enough respect to Monsieur Ney. And the fact that she was right, that he shouldn’t have blurted out his foolish comment, only made his sense of resentment worse.
    “Your family don’t approve of me,” he said.
    “I didn’t say that.”
    “You didn’t say it, but it’s the truth.”
    She didn’t answer.
    “Tell me,” he asked, “are you going to live your entire life under the thumb of Monsieur Ney?”
    “He employs Aunt Adeline.”
    “To help him steal money from a lot of helpless old women?”
    “No.”
    “Yes. That’s what he’s doing. And if you spend your life working for him, that’s what you’ll be doing.”
    “You think you know everything, but you don’t.”
    “You think he’s going to look after you? You think he’s going to look after your aunt? I’ll tell you how she’ll finish up. Like Mademoiselle Bac.”
    “You don’t understand,” Édith suddenly cried out. “At least Mademoiselle Bac has a roof over her head.”
    He shrugged.
    “I’d sooner be in the gutter.”
    “You probably will be. My aunt’s right. You’re a fool.” She got up. “I have to go now.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    “I have to go.”
    So Thomas sat there feeling very angry, and it did not occur to him that when she was twenty yards down the street Édith had burst into tears.

    That winter seemed long to Thomas Gascon. He was high above the Paris rooftops now, on the cold, iron tower. As he gazed down, gray day after gray day, the winter trees by the building site, and the long sweep of the Seine, looked bare and sad.
    The work was hard. When the creeper cranes raised each section of the iron framework into place, the workmen swarmed over it. The sections came from the factory held together with temporary bolts, all of which had to be replaced with rivets.
    It took a gang of four to rivet. First, the apprentice heated the rivet in a brazier until it was almost white hot, and swollen. The holder, wearing thick leather gloves, picked the rivet up with a pair of tongs and fitted it into the hole that was perfectly aligned between the metal girders or plates to be joined; then he’d block it in place with a heavy metal counterweight while the first of the two strikers would use a hammer to fashion a broad head on the other end of the rivet. Last, a second striker with a heavy sledgehammer would hammer the rivet down. As the hammered rivet cooled and shrank, it would grip the metal plates together tighter and tighter, finally exerting a force of three tons.
    Each team had its own particular hammering sound, so that the men themselves could often tell without looking exactly who was working at any given moment.
    The work was intense, and come rain, sleet or snow, it went on, eight hours a day.
    Thomas was a striker. He usually liked to work with open-finger gloves, warming his hands from time to time with the heat from the fires used to heat the rivets. But he was obliged to abandon them for leather gloves, and often his fingers were numb. When the wind got up, it lashed his body as mercilessly as it would a sailor up a mast.
    Early in the new year, however, the work of the flyers changed. For now they began to construct the tower’s massive platform.
    To Thomas, this felt quite strange. It was as if, building a table, he had suddenly moved from the vertical confines of the leg to the vast horizontal space of the tabletop.
    “It’s more like building a house,” he remarked. A house in the sky, to be sure—or rather, an enormous apartment block, constructed of iron.
    The base of the platform was nearly two hundred feet in the air. In the central pit underneath, a huge square of scaffolding rose from the ground like a tree trunk, with branches spreading out to the underside of the platform’s edge, so that away from the platform’s center, he was still looking down at an