by Jill Jonnes
In 1888 Boulanger reappeared in Paris, and was promptly sacked from the army for leaving his provincial post. Although he had become the leader of a right-wing party called The Nationalists, he made alluring promises to both the exiled Comte de France, ever hopeful of regaining the French throne, and the aging Prince Napoleon, in Switzerland, while he himself continued to insist that he was a liberal republican. By being all things to all men, Boulanger and his party managed to pick up numerous seats in these elections. His onetime patron Clemenceau denounced him, he was injured in a duel with republican prime minister Floquet, and many opposing factions united behind him, hailing him as “The Man of Destiny” who would root out corruption. Passions crescendoed as Boulanger ran to represent Paris in the Chamber of Deputies in a special January 27, 1889, election. All that month, the infatuated Bennett had thrown The New York Herald’s European edition behind the Duchesse d’Uzès’s candidate, describing the Boulanger “boom” in an approving way and the man as “the hero of the moment.”
On January 20, Monsieur Gordon-Bennett received a summons to the office of His Excellency Ernest Constans, Minister of the Interior, in charge of all police matters. Bennett arrived at the ministry to find Constans seated in his large and elaborate office. He began by flattering the publisher: “We enjoy having you with us and respect and admire you for . . . publishing here a European edition of your great American newspaper.” There the friendly tone ended. Noting Bennett’s unseemly enthusiasm for Boulanger, Constans warned, “We must therefore ask you to refrain from giving aid to those who are opposing us, or this Government shall find itself compelled to ask you to leave this country and take your paper along with you.” Not since his father’s day had Bennett received such a dressing-down, or such an ultimatum. Although his Paris paper had established his importance here, the French played by different rules; no American politician would ever have dared issue such dictates. And yet, as an American, he lived here only at the French government’s pleasure. The coverage and editorials of the Paris Herald changed abruptly, denouncing the general and his crusade to upend democracy.
Many in Paris believed that January 27, 1889, would be the last day of the French republic, and “huge crowds gathered in the Place de la Madeleine outside the Restaurant Durand where Boulanger and his supporters were dining.” When General Boulanger pulled off a stirring victory, those worshipful crowds waited breathlessly for him to seize the moment. All royalist Paris anticipated a thrilling military coup, while others awaited Boulanger’s coronation as a new Napoleon. Numerous supporters, including the Duchesse d’Uzès, were among the guests at this victory celebration. “It was less well known that Boulanger’s beloved mistress, Madame de Bonnemains, was also waiting discreetly for her lover in another room. . . . It was impossible to preserve order in the streets and boulevards. Carriages were stopped by the crowds and the passengers forced to cry ‘Vive Boulanger! ’
“In the restaurant, Boulanger’s companions urged him to make his way to the Élysée in a triumphal procession and take over. . . . But Boulanger refused to march against his President. He would not even show himself to the crowd. . . . There would be no coup d’état. Instead, he drove away from the restaurant to go to bed with his mistress.” The handsome Boulanger had hesitated, and the moment was lost, with the Third Republic surviving this particular challenge. The Exposition Universelle, it seemed, would still celebrate liberty and technological and social progress (and yes, the downfall of the Bastille), but not the demise of the republic and the rise of a new emperor.
The correspondent for The New York Times reported back to his countrymen in late January 1889 not only on the anticlimactic Boulanger drama, but also that “the late cold snap made things most uncomfortable for the workmen at the Eiffel Tower. While the aristocracy enjoyed the unusual possibility of a skating frolic . . . in the Bois, the poor devils working away at French glory in the Champ de Mars were nearly frozen. At 6 o’clock in the morning when the work day begins, the thermometer marked 25 degrees, and the cold biting wind seemed to sway the great tower. It takes a good quarter of an hour for them to crawl up 230 feet, and there they found 27 degrees. It is here that the four restaurants are to be located. . . . The workmen eat there even now, indifferent to the beehive beneath or to the landscape beyond. All they find or want is cheap food, warm stoves, and the relief from the tedious climb three times a day.
“The men working way up on the top have to face still greater severity of temperature and far more discomfort. They are about 20 in all, forming the faithful bodyguard of M. Eiffel and his son-in-law M. Salles and they are heroes in their quiet hard-working way. Luckily their labor requires blazing fire to heat the huge iron nails, and as their blows must come heavy and strong, work is fun and cold leisure pain. . . .
“And, it looks as if the first outburst of derision that ridiculed the idea of the monster construction might finally be changed into a victorious hosanna of praise, to the particular happiness of M. Eiffel himself and to the tribute also of his more obscure assistants.”
The month of February delivered a nation-shaking shock when Ferdinand de Lesseps, who had been desperately trying to raise enough money to continue pushing through Gustave Eiffel’s $25 million system of locks on the Panama Canal, announced that the last bond issue had not been even half subscribed. Since 1881 the company had endured many difficulties, and had repeatedly been forced to seek additional funds. Yet, after eight years and $300 million, a viable canal was only starting to be built. On December 14, the Panama Canal Company had filed for bankruptcy, but the ever-optimistic de Lesseps immediately petitioned the government to let the company reorganize and regroup. When the Chamber of Deputies voted against his proposal, de Lesseps went white and whispered, “It is impossible! It is shameful.”
Even then, de Lesseps had refused to acknowledge defeat, rallying his flagging stockholders and pressing for more time, a lottery, something. In late January, he had launched a new canal company, but of sixty thousand shares of its stock, only nine thousand sold. On February 4, the end had come, and a liquidator was appointed. Gustave Eiffel could not believe France would allow a project of such transcendent strategic importance to fail, and instructed his men at the isthmus to keep working, albeit at a slower pace, while they waited for the politicians to come to their senses. Meanwhile, all over France, those who had believed in Ferdinand de Lesseps and his canal also clung to that hope, knowing that otherwise they faced financial devastation.
The Eiffel Tower on February 2, 1889
CHAPTER FOUR
“The First Elevator of Its Kind”
On February 24, 1889, journalist Robert C. Henri woke up at 8:00 a.m. and rushed to his window to see what the Paris day would be like. “Desolation on desolation!” he wrote. “The sky was black—the snow fell—the air was icy—the thermometer was at two degrees below zero.” Henri, whose pen name was Hugues Le Roux, intended on that day to become the first journalist to ascend to the top of the nearly completed Tour en Fer. “I had an engagement to meet M. Eiffel at the foot of the Tower at two o’clock!” he would tell the readers of Le Figaro. “Well! We would make the ascent—even though Paris disappeared entirely beneath this cold white counterpane.”
Fortunately, by the time Le Roux’s carriage arrived at the Champ de Mars, which was covered in icy white drifts, the snowfall had temporarily subsided. Eiffel was awaiting him with a party of fifteen, including “several ladies who purposed going only as far as the second story, and my guide, who was to accompany me to the platform 900 feet above the earth where the riveters were at work. Four or five persons who had already made the ascent had armed themselves against the cold with close caps, ear muffs and fur gloves.” And so at two thirty, with the temperature now one degree below zero, they set out. “In Indian file, preceded by M. Eiffel and the guide, we entered the right pillar of the Tower.” Eiffel advised the reporter to imitate his gait. The engineer “climbed slowly,” wrote Le Roux, “with his right arm resting o
n the railing. He swings his body from one hip to the other, using the momentum of the swing to negotiate each step. Here the incline was so gradual that we could chat as we climbed, and no one was winded when we reached the first platform.”
It was now 3:05, and they stopped to look about. This first platform was like “a huge ship-builder’s yard, in a perfect fever of work. Four great pavilions were going up at once. . . . They are now building almost two hundred feet of wine-cellars. At mealtimes, this vast platform will accommodate 4,200 persons—the population of a town.” Down below, observed Le Roux, “the silhouettes of passers-by and fiacres are like little black spots of ink in the streets, very black, very clear . . . [like] small mechanical figures which step jerkily through the little panoramas frequently exhibited in shop windows. Only the rippling Seine seemed still alive.”
At 3:25 the party of climbers, now reduced to ten, began the ascent up a small spiral staircase to the second platform, a matter of twenty minutes. There Le Roux was astonished to see “wagons mounted on rails. Yes! At this height had been constructed a railroad with its engine and cars for the furtherance of the work here.” When finished, the second platform, 377 feet high, would be furnished with benches and settees so those who walked up could rest and enjoy the vistas. “To the south there is a fine view of the Exposition grounds, with the glass roof of the Machinery Hall looking like a blue lake of molten lead.” The light was already starting to fade, and when Le Roux glanced through a square opening in the wooden flooring, he looked “straight down into the abyss. Far below, I could see very small ducks swimming in a half-frozen pond. A shiver ran down my spine at the thought of a possible fall from this height. It grew suddenly colder.” Unlike Eiffel, here was a man with an active sense of vertigo.
At 4:10 p.m., the party set out again. “The cold now became intense,” wrote Le Roux; “a terrible wind was abroad and brought with it a sudden, blinding hail. The cold railing hurt my fingers so much that I tried to climb with my hands in my pockets, but the wind buffeted me and I was blinded by the driving sleet. So I grabbed the railing again and shielded my face with my arm. All I could see was M. Eiffel’s coat tails ahead.” Shivering, the wind whipping round them, they climbed steadily, pausing briefly at the intermediate platform at 660 feet.
It was now 5:00 p.m., and twilight was engulfing the city. “Again to the iron stairway!” declared Le Roux. But as he began once more to ascend, he made an unnerving discovery. “The staircase was not attached to the tower except at the top. It oscillated sickeningly beneath us. This put a sudden damper on the zeal of many of our companions who had mounted cheerfully enough as far as the Intermediate Platform. . . . We were now only four. M. Eiffel, a M. Richard, the guide, and myself. We had passed the steps and were on the ladders. Here were neither platforms nor balconies—only the ladders poised on thick planks which rode the immensity of space! The ladders were lashed together with mighty ropes. Look not to the right nor to the left! Keep your eyes only on the rung of the ladder on which you are about to place your foot! After the third ladder we attained the platform 900 feet above the earth. Here the riveters were at work, a dozen men, lost in space. As well they might—abreast of the fearful wind—they worked under the shelter of canvas. . . . As we stood there, they lifted a huge rivet, red hot from the forge, and drove it into place. The furious wind caught up the blows of their ringing iron mallets and rushed off with them, into the night. . . .
Artist Henri Rivière’s photograph of workers up on the Eiffel Tower
“The wind tore spitefully at my garments as if trying to wrench them from my body. . . . I was sensible of a peculiar swaying motion, as if the planks beneath my feet were the deck of some vessel rocking in mid-ocean. . . . I was approaching the edge of the platform. Before looking down into the fathomless darkness . . . I closed my eyes as one does involuntarily, when brought face to face with a great danger. . . . Then I strained my eyes to catch the outline at the base of the tower. What a plunge that would be! How some human creature standing here, like myself, but seized with the sudden madness that lurks about high places, might fling himself out, with a horrid shriek. . . . B-r-r-r! I was going mad, myself. And forgetful, really, of where I stood, I gave myself a little irritated shake. As I did so the weight of my body seemed to slip forward, and I hung, for an instant, far inclined over the edge of the Tower. Involuntarily I extended my hand. My fingers encountered a rope—and they encircled it eagerly, grateful for the timely support.
“Horror of horrors! The rope yielded to my touch. In a frenzy of terror my grip upon it tightened, and it began slowly to descend! I felt myself descending with it! I felt myself falling! . . . Suddenly I regained possession of my hands. I found the rope was still clutched in them. Voices came to me through the wind. A voice close to me!
“ ‘You should never touch a rope—that one is attached only to a pulley. Had you leaned more heavily on it the consequences would not have been pleasant. . . . It is now time to descend,’ said M. Eiffel.”
Le Roux recovered from his imagined brush with death long enough to gaze down to find Paris “swallowed by the darkness . . . night covered the world. . . . [L]ike some fabled city, Paris had sunk forever beneath the waves and no trace remained, but sometimes there came across the seas, at nightfall, a hum and murmur from her buried streets, the faint, glad voices of her children or the ghostly ringing of her church bells.” The two men stared down at the metropolis spread out below. It was bitterly cold and growing late, so the four began the long half-hour descent down the lashed ladders and swaying spiral staircase through the dark.
At the second platform, they gratefully entered a canteen and warmed up with hot drinks. As they relaxed, Monsieur Richard regaled them with stories of his climb up Mont Blanc. Eiffel reported happily that “congratulations were coming in from all over, even from many of the artists who signed the famous protest. ‘There are only three or four stubborn writers still holding out,’ he said. ‘I really don’t understand why.’ Conversation dragged on lazily. We were reluctant to leave the warmth of our shelter to go back into the wind which seemed to weep with the sound of human sobs in these hundreds of feet of iron stretched from earth to the clouds like an Aeolian harp.”
Eiffel could only be grateful that his guest M. Le Roux, during the long ascent to the construction at the top, had not inquired about the whereabouts of the elevators. The unfortunate answer was that Eiffel still did not have functioning ones, even though the contract had called for them to be already completed. In less than three months, hundreds of thousands of people would be swarming in to visit the fair, and in the course of the summer, Eiffel hoped that a million would visit its foremost attraction, his already world-famous tower. But would anyone be able to ascend by elevator? No other problem in the tower’s construction had proven so difficult, so vexing.
The fair commission supervising the tower’s construction together with Eiffel had early on jointly retained an engineer named Backmann to design the tower’s elevators. “The curvature of the Tower’s legs imposed a problem unique in elevator design, and it caused great annoyance to Eiffel, the Fair’s Commission, and all others concerned,” wrote technology historian Robert M. Vogel. “The problem of reaching the first platform was not serious. The legs were wide enough and their curvature so slight in this lower portion as to permit them to contain a straight run of track. . . . Two elevators to operate only that far were contracted for with no difficulty—one to be placed in the east leg and one in the west.”
The truly perplexing issue was how to safely and swiftly transport passengers the 377 feet up from the ground to the second platform (the north leg) and also from the first platform to the second (the south leg). These two elevators would have to negotiate the tower’s most pronounced curvature, an unprecedented challenge in an era when elevators ran not on electric motors, but by hydraulic or water pressure. Then, to reach the top of the tower, passengers on the second platform would have to take yet another elevator and as
cend in two stages, making a quick transfer halfway up. Monsieur Backmann chose to address himself only to designing the elevator for the ascent from the second platform to the very top, leaving the commission to seek bids elsewhere for the four elevators leading to the first and then second floors. The commission had ruled that any elevator installed in the Eiffel Tower would have to be absolutely safe, reasonably swift, and of French manufacture. The first-floor contract, a simple enough matter, was awarded to Roux, Combaluzier et Lepape, who would install a clunky articulated chain-link device that would move the cars up and down with a notable but stolid clatter.
But when the commission solicited bids for the second-floor elevators, only the Paris branch of the American Otis Brothers and Company responded. The company prided itself on its global preeminence, as Charles Otis told shareholders not long afterward: “[We] have shipped our products to almost every civilized country of the globe. We have opened a large acquaintance and trade with Australia. . . . Our London connection is promising well . . . notwithstanding the well known prejudice of the English people against American products. . . . Our business along the Pacific Slope has also been satisfactory. We have during the past year shipped elevators to China and South America.”
But Otis, however global its reach, was not a French firm, and so the commission briskly rejected its interest as an impertinence, and issued another call for bids. Again no French firms came forward. By then, the summer of 1887, Eiffel was six months into his labors, and some firm would soon have to begin elevator work on what was the most difficult section of the tower. The commission reluctantly waived its own rules and in July awarded the $22,500 contract to Otis.
W. Frank Hall, the Otis representative in Paris, gloried in the challenge: “Yes, this is the first elevator of its kind. Our people for thirty-eight years have been doing this work, and have constructed thousands of elevators vertically, and many on an incline, but never one to strike a radius of 160 feet for a distance of over 50 feet. It has required a great amount of preparatory study.” It soon emerged that the Otis Company had been studying the matter ever since Eiffel won Lockroy’s contest. “Quite so,” said Hall, “we knew that, although the French authorities were very reluctant to give away this piece of work, they would be bound to come to us, and so we were preparing for them.” After all, Otis Brothers had just installed the elevator in what had been the world’s tallest structure up until then, the Washington Monument. Little did the ebullient Hall of Otis or Eiffel dream of the dire troubles and conflicts ahead.