Eiffel's Tower

by Jill Jonnes

  Only Gustave Eiffel and two dozen others, including his son-in-law, Salles, Lockroy, Gaston Tissandier, the aerialist editor of La Nature, a few officials, and all the journalists (including a dogged Paris Herald reporter), persevered for the final half-hour climb to the top observation deck. From this lofty new perch, Le Figaro’s reporter (not Le Roux, on this occasion) discovered that the human landscape and enterprise were reduced to disquieting inconsequence: “Mounts Valérien, Montmartre, Sannois, all look like little gray blobs; the forest of Saint-Germain fades into the blue mists, the Seine becomes a tranquil rivulet, traversed by Lilliputian barges, and Paris appears like a tiny stage set with its straight roads, squares rooftops, and orderly facades. The tiny black dots are the crowds. Everything everywhere looks devoid of life, except for the green of the Bois; there is no visible movement in this immensity; no noise to show the life of the people who are ‘below.’ One would say that a sudden slumber has, in broad daylight, rendered the city inert and silent.”

  Up a small spiral stair was a second glassed-in floor of four rooms—one was Eiffel’s personal well-furnished aerie apartment, the other three were devoted to scientific studies. Some of the men blanched as they saw they now had to climb yet another circular stair out into the open where the wind was strong. Only eleven continued up, emerging outside on a tiny windy balcony with only a slender rail fence. Here was the true, terrifying pinnacle of the tower. Eiffel exultantly unfolded a gigantic red, white, and blue French flag—fifteen feet by five feet—with the large initials R.F. (République Française) embroidered upon it in gold. He offered it to Monsieur Lockroy, who demurred, insisting Eiffel have the honor. As Eiffel was hoisting the tricolor up the waiting flagpole, one of the journalists began emotionally singing “La Marseillaise,” and all soon joined in. At that moment, 2:40 p.m., as the flag unfurled and waved high above Paris, twenty-one cannon-like fireworks boomed forth from the second platform.

  Up on the dizzying pinnacle, the wind was rushing by, the flag was flapping, and all bowed their heads as Eiffel’s chief engineer proclaimed, “We salute the flag of 1789, which our fathers bore so proudly, which won so many victories, and which witnessed so much progress in science and humanity. We have tried to raise an adequate monument in honor of the great date of 1789, wherefore the Tower’s colossal proportions.” With that, a city official announced Eiffel’s workers would share in a 1,000 franc bonus. The hardy few, higher up than any man (except in a balloon) had ever been in Paris, popped open champagne bottles to celebrate with toasts: “Gloire à M. Eiffel et à ses collaborateurs!” “Vive la France!” “Vive Paris!” “Et vive la République!” They admired the view, calculated to be almost fifty miles distant on a clear day, and then began the long descent. Forty-five vertiginous minutes later, Eiffel and the exultant flag-raisers were back at the foot of the tower, where Prime Minister Pierre Tirard was waiting.

  Eiffel and all his guests sat down to “an elegant little lunch served to replace the animal carbon that the visitors had expended in mounting and descending the tower.” The 199 laborers enjoyed ham, German sausage, and cheese. When all had eaten and drunk their fill, Eiffel climbed up on a chair and began to speak, declaring his great satisfaction and gratitude to all who had helped complete this colossal triumphal arch of wrought iron. He described the tower’s great scientific potential as an observatory and laboratory, announcing that he had “decided to inscribe in letters of gold on the great frieze of the first platform, and in the place of honor, the names of the greatest men of science who have honored France, from 1789, down to our day. Besides all these uses, which I might have explained in greater detail, but which, even in this rapid summary will serve to show that we have not erected an object of barren wonder, the tower possesses in my eyes a usefulness of a totally different order, which is the true source of the ardor which has inspired me in my work.

  “The public at large understood this, and it is also the reason for the very general and warm sympathy they have shown me.

  “My goal was to demonstrate to the whole world that France is a great country, and that she is still capable of success where others have failed.” Eiffel’s guests and workmen joined in waves of applause.

  Gustave Eiffel now also announced the installation of a plaque on the tower with the names of 199 of his workmen to honor their hard and faithful labor. While there had been the strikes, he as well as anyone appreciated the sheer physical effort, the terrible cold, the relentless pace, and the necessary precision and care involved in assembling this 7,300-ton structure. The tower had, regrettably, taken two lives: a worker who died in a fall, and another hurt in an accident who then died of gangrene.

  Prime Minister Tirard now stood, a graybeard of sixty-one, a committed republican who had survived France’s worst political convulsions, conceding gracefully his newfound admiration for a tower he had originally reviled. Then, as a gratifying surprise, the prime minister revealed that he had nominated Eiffel for promotion in the Legion of Honor to the rank of officer. Eiffel’s boyhood friend Gustave Noblemaire, who already held this rank and was wearing his own red rosette ribbon on his lapel, stepped forward, removed his rosette, and attached it to Eiffel’s lapel as the crowd cheered. Eiffel smiled radiantly, suffused with an almost childlike happiness. At this, several workmen arose holding six bouquets of fragrant white lilacs. They presented the first to Eiffel, the second to Adolphe Salles, and then one to each of Eiffel’s four other assistants. As the triumphant celebration broke up, Eiffel shook hands with all the many well-wishers. Throughout this informal ceremony, the wind had been blowing stronger, the skies growing darker and threatening, and now winds lashed harder and the heavens finally opened.

  For the republicans it had been a great day. The Eiffel Tower, which they had championed as the centerpiece of their World’s Fair, was already a huge success. As Eiffel had said earlier in his remarks, “The tower is now known to the whole world; it has struck the imagination of every nation, and inspired the most remote with the desire of visiting the Exhibition.”

  Also on that day, Gen. Georges Boulanger had fled the country, fearful that he might be arrested for treason. France could now concentrate without distraction on its great fête.

  Down in Pont-Aven, Brittany, Paul Gauguin was delighted to hear that his friend Émile Schuffenecker had secured a promising place within the fair itself to exhibit their paintings. “Bravo!” he wrote Schuff in April. “You have brought it off.” Excluded from the official French painting pavilion, and yearning for attention, Gauguin lacked the funds to emulate Courbet and Manet, who had solved their exclusion from the 1867 exposition by building their own pavilions. Schuff had learned that Monsieur Volpini, whose Café Riche was the scene of Impressionist dinners organized by Gustave Caillebotte, had a contract to run a restaurant in the Palais des Beaux-Arts. Volpini’s Café des Beaux-Arts would stand directly at the exit of the official French painting pavilion with its hundreds of paintings depicting historical and biblical tales and sweetly pastoral scenes. Moreover, Schuff had discovered that Volpini was in despair because the large mirrors for his café walls had not arrived.

  Schuff accordingly persuaded Volpini to cancel the mirrors, cover the walls with pomegranate red material, and hang art in their stead. He, Gauguin, and their friends, declaring themselves the Groupe Impressioniste et Synthétiste, would provide the decor. Gauguin asked Theo Van Gogh if Vincent would like to join them. “At first,” Theo later wrote Vincent, “I said you would show some things too, but they assumed an air of being such tremendous fellows that it really became a bad thing to participate. . . . It gave one somewhat the impression of going to the World’s Fair by the back stairs.”

  Vincent had had a difficult year, battling his demons. In February, after yet another short stay in the hospital, the neighbors protested his return to the Yellow House in a petition that complained that his “excessive drinking” led to wild behavior that “frightens all the inhabitants of the quarter, and above all the wom
en and children.” In a letter to his sister, Vincent sadly confided his suffering from “moods of indescribable mental anguish, sometimes moments when the veil of time and the fatality of circumstances seemed to be torn apart for an instance.” Even an invitation from pointillist artist Paul Signac to join him in Grasse did not tempt Vincent, who had resigned himself to closing the Yellow House and retreating to a sanitarium fifteen miles away in St.-Rémy.

  As for Gauguin, he planned to exhibit ten works at the fair, including paintings from Martinique, Brittany, and his two months in Arles with Vincent. Gauguin warned Schuff, “Only remember it is not an exhibition for the others. So let us arrange it for a little group of comrades, and from this point of view I want to be represented there as fully as possible.” Gauguin and Schuff hoped that tired fairgoers sipping coffee or enjoying a glass of wine, beguiled by the music of the all-woman Russian string orchestra, would be smitten with the bold contemporary art all about, simple scenes of the modern world, intensely colored, the paint thick and almost crude, and might even purchase a work or two.

  Paul Gauguin viewed himself as nothing less than an art warrior, portraying the modern world as it was, combating stale state-sanctioned art, art that barely acknowledged the nineteenth century but harked back again and again to ancient myths, Bible stories, and battles. For fifty years, he lamented, “the State increasingly protected mediocrity and professors who suited everyone. . . . Yet alongside these pedants, courageous fighters have come along and dared to show: paintings without recipes. . . . All of XXth-century art will derive from them. . . . We would like to have seen these independent artists in a separate section at the Exhibition.” As that was not to be, he, a modern artist, would await no patron, but hang his own show.

  In early May, Vincent wrote his new sister-in-law from St.-Rémy, where the mental asylum was housed in a twelfth-century Franciscan convent with an austere cloistered walkway around a lovely interior garden. “The fear and horror of madness that I used to have has already lessened a great deal. And though here you continually hear terrible cries and howls like beasts in a menagerie, in spite of that people get to know each other very well and help each other when their attacks come on. When I am working in the garden, they all come to look, and I assure you they have the discretion and manners to leave me alone—more than the good people of the town of Arles, for instance.

  “It may well be that I shall stay here long enough—I have never been so peaceful as here and in the hospital in Arles—to be able to paint a little at last. Quite near here there are some little mountains, gray and blue, and at their foot some very, very green cornfields and pines.” A few weeks later, he wrote his brother to say he was doing fine. “I have a little room with greenish-gray paper with two curtains of sea-green with a design of very pale roses, brightened by slight touches of blood-red. These curtains, probably the relics of some rich and ruined deceased, are very pretty in design. A very worn armchair probably comes from the same source; it is upholstered with tapestry. . . . Through the iron-barred window I see a square field of wheat in an enclosure, a perspective like Van Gloyen, above which I see the morning sun rising in all its glory. . . .

  “The food is so-so. Naturally it tastes rather moldy, like a cockroach-infested restaurant in Paris or in a boardinghouse. As these poor souls do absolutely nothing (not a book, nothing to distract them but a game of boules and a game of checkers) they have no other daily distraction than to stuff themselves with chick peas, beans, lentils, and other groceries.”

  For some time, Thomas Edison had been hearing disquieting reports from London about his old friend Col. George Gouraud, who held the European rights to the phonograph. The colonel was apparently promoting the machine as a high-profile Edison curiosity and personal cash cow rather than as a serious product of great promise. Samuel Insull, general manager of the Edison Machine Works, had once worked for Gouraud and now heard from his father in London that Gouraud was “ ‘making a great deal of money’ exhibiting the phonograph. I do not think the contract calls for such a thing.” Indeed, Gouraud, besieged at Edison House by crowds anxious to hear this miraculous apparatus, had decided to charge for the privilege of listening (on one of the long earphones) to an introductory speech by Edison, followed by short recordings of Prime Minister William Gladstone, the poet Robert Browning flubbing some of his own verses, and Sir Arthur Sullivan declaring, “I am astonished and somewhat terrified at the results of this evening’s experiments—astonished at the wonderful power you have developed and terrified at the thought that so much hideous and bad music may be put on record forever!”

  Edison largely ignored the gossip about his old friend, for he was focused on the larger issues—above all, the coming Paris World’s Fair. “Without doubt,” Edison reminded Gouraud in early March of 1889, “the fair would be . . . the best opportunity, which can or will be had, to introduce the phonograph to the peoples of Europe, in fact the whole world, and as such my desire is to take every advantage of it.” Back in December Edison had told him, “I have placed Mr. W. J. Hammer in charge of the whole [Paris World’s Fair] exhibit and he is actively engaged in getting together everything which we propose showing. These arrangements, of course, include the phonograph. I will send instruments from here for the purpose and attend to all the details in connection therewith.” Edison expected Gouraud to pay his part of the very substantial costs.

  In late March, Gouraud confirmed the unpleasant rumors about himself when he blithely informed Edison that he had installed a phonograph in the Gainsborough Gallery on Bond Street, where “anyone who wishes to pay for the privilege may see it.” As huge crowds waited patiently and paid the fee, the enterprise proved gratifyingly lucrative. Edison was furious, especially when he learned that Gouraud had proposed to Hammer to replicate this profitable scheme at the Paris fair. On April 8, less than a month before the Exposition Universelle was to open, Edison sent Gouraud a cablegram: “Refuse absolutely to permit charging entrance fees or the introduction of any side show or Barnum methods at Paris.” Gouraud argued back that his heavy fair expenses in exhibiting the phonograph warranted “a small charge of admission to the general public and complimentary tickets can be issued to the nobility and other people of importance. . . . I quite understand that you shall not participate in the expense. . . . I will take the risk myself and my profits.”

  Shortly thereafter, Edison cabled Hammer: “Make no arrangement with Gouraud. . . . Intend exhibit shall be my own, at my own expense, and under my control.” On April 20, Edison informed Gouraud of the same and charged him with following a course that “threatens to bring the enterprise into contempt in the estimation of the public. . . . You have a very large interest in the proceeds of the legitimate enterprise contemplated in your contract with myself. . . . I expect to invest money before looking for a return. . . . I will not countenance an exhibition of the phonograph for money anywhere within the City of Paris during the time that the Universal Exposition is in progress.”

  Edison had perhaps less patience for Gouraud—who was, after all, an old business partner—than he might have, for earlier that year the great inventor had learned that two of his trusted American partners in the phonograph had secretly diverted to themselves $250,000 due Edison when they sold his phonograph rights. Edison, wounded and angered by this betrayal, was turning to the courts for redress.

  Alas for Gen. Rush Hawkins—he, too, had his woes. As April faded into May and the opening of the exhibition loomed, Whistler’s defection looked to be the least of his troubles. As late as March, Hawkins had still been desperately trying to get an official allocation of exhibition space, some actual walls for hanging art. It would be hard for anyone who had not experienced the Parisian art scene to comprehend the complex and exalted role that art played in the city. Edward Simmons, one of the expatriate artists chosen for the official American exhibition, caught its spirit when he described his first Salon in 1881. He and his art student friends would “congregate at the Palais
de l’Industrie [on the Champs-Élysées] and watch the four or five thousand pictures arrive for selection. From these only about two thousand were chosen. We were a great crowd, lining the grand stairway or sitting on the balustrade, and it was everybody’s business to be funny. First would come vans and wagons from which would issue twenty and sometimes forty pictures; then messengers; poor artists with their one creation.” Hoots, jeers, and curses greeted the flood tide of paintings, with the catcalls pausing respectfully only when the work of an acknowledged master came through the gauntlet.

  The day the Salon opened, the president of the republic, no less, hosted the opening ceremony before an assemblage of political and artistic notables, who then toured the galleries of paintings hung from floor to ceiling. That afternoon’s vernissage, or private viewing, was so socially fraught that top Paris fashion houses vied to have their new gowns debut there. “Everyone of importance and all fashion turned out,” recalled Simmons. “New York society cannot conceive of what a place the fine arts have in France. . . . [G]reat masses of people go through the galleries together, with some such person as Sarah Bernhardt at the head and the lesser following. . . . One who always attracted a crowd was Rosa Bonheur [the animal painter] who was made famous and wealthy by American dollars. She looked like a small, undersized man, wore gray trousers, Prince Albert coat and top hat to these affairs. Her face was gray white and wizened, and she gesticulated, speaking in a high, squeaky voice. I have never seen anyone who gave a more perfect impression of a eunuch.” For days, even weeks, the press devoted endless columns to critiques and discussions of the painters and their work, and speculated about who might win a medal, and thus launch or consolidate a career.

  Just as there were famous artists, so were there famous collectors. One such was the self-made millionaire Alfred Chauchard, owner of the city’s fashionable department store Les Magasins du Louvre. “Whenever Chauchard’s tall, bearded figure was seen in the Salon, there would be a sudden hush among the public. Even the most famous painters would defer to him as he ponderously inspected the display, occasionally shaking hands, solemnly passing judgement on one of the year’s ‘novelties’ or remarking to the critics and journalists who followed him that ‘this year the Salon is of exceptional quality. . . . What a pity that weeks are needed to see it all! Too much talent!” Chauchard showed off his own art collection during lavish entertainments at his avenue Velasquez mansion.