Paris: The Novel

almost uninterrupted vertical drop. But he noticed that, since his eye was constantly led to look across the growing horizontal floor of the platform, he was hardly aware of the chasm below.
    Structurally, Thomas well understood, it was this platform that bound the four great pillar stacks together and would provide the base for the soaring tower above. But even so, as the work progressed, he was astounded by the scale of the thing. The walk around the side galleries, from which there were fine views of Paris, was over three hundred yards long. There was space for numerous rooms, including a large restaurant.
    This huge band of hollow space was carefully locked into place. It was, as Eiffel had foreseen, a mighty task, and it took time. It was not until March that, having finally checked that the basic structure of his four-legged table was solid and perfectly level that Eiffel gave the order: “Proceed upward.”
    Yet as the creeper cranes began their journey up the pylons again, Thomas noticed something else.
    It seemed to him that the tower must be falling behind schedule. Eiffel’s assistant engineers would sometimes be fretful. Thomas would see them shaking their heads. He knew from the drawings he’d seen that the massive span between the ground and the platform was to be finished with an elegant semicircular arch across the outside edge. Yet as April wore on and the pylons climbed into the sky above the platform, the whole undersideof the tower looked a mess. But whatever was passing in his mind, Eiffel himself was always calm, polite, serene.
    Only once did Thomas see Monsieur Eiffel angry. It was during the lunchtime break, one day in May. Eiffel was standing alone, near the northwestern foot of his tower, reading a newspaper. Suddenly Thomas saw the engineer crumple his paper and slap it furiously against his side. Then, seeing Thomas watching him, he beckoned him over.
    “Do you know why I am angry, young Gascon?” It was evident that he needed to get something off his mind.
    “Non, monsieur.”
    “They do not like my tower. Some of the greatest names in France hate it: Garnier, who built the Paris Opéra, Maupassant the writer, Dumas, whose father wrote
The Three Musketeers
. There have even been petitions against it. Do you know people who hate it?”
    “
Oui, monsieur
. Madame Govrit de la Tour told me I should not work on it.”
    “There you are. They even try to subvert my workmen. But this article in the newspaper today, young Gascon, surpasses everything. It says that my tower is indecent. That it will be nothing but a great phallus in the sky.”
    Thomas didn’t know what to say, so he shook his head.
    “What is the greatest threat to a tall structure, young Gascon? Do you know?”
    “Its weight, I suppose, monsieur.”
    “No. Not really. It’s the wind. The reason my tower has the shape it has, the reason it is constructed the way it is, all this is because of the wind, whose force would otherwise tear it down. That is the reason. Nothing else.”
    “Is that why it is just iron girders, so the wind can blow through?”
    “Excellent. It is an open lattice construction, so that the wind can blow clean through it. And despite the fact that it is made of iron, which is strong, it is actually very light. If you put the tower in a cylindrical box, as a bottle of wine is sometimes sold, the air contained in the box would be almost as heavy as the metal tower itself. Amazing, but true.”
    “I would never have imagined that,” Thomas confessed.
    “But even this is not the point. The shape of the structure, its slender curve, is purely mathematical. The stress of the structure exactly equalizes that of the wind, from any direction. That is the reason for its form.”He shook his head. “The arts and literature are the glories of the human spirit. But all too often, those who practice them have little understanding of mathematics, and none of engineering. They see a phallus, with their superficial eye, and think that they have understood something. But they have understood nothing at all. They have no idea of how things work, of the true structure of the world. They are not capable of perceiving that, in truth, this tower is an expression of mathematical equations and structural simplicity far more beautiful than they could even imagine.” He looked down at the crumpled newspaper in disgust.
    “Oui, monsieur,”
said Thomas, feeling that, even if he did not understand the mathematics