Eiffel's Tower

by Jill Jonnes

  At the U.S. Legation in Paris, Minister Whitelaw Reid was pleased to note that the French republican government had trounced its political foes in the late-September elections. As he had advised Secretary of State James Blaine back in June, this would be an opportune time to press forward on the pork question. On October 16, Reid accordingly invited Monsieur Spuller to join him for a thorough tour and inspection of the full array of American pork products on exhibit at the World’s Fair, recently awarded the fair’s “highest prize.” Reid presumed that the French would thus see for themselves “the perfect healthfulness of the meat.”

  Monsieur Spuller proved very friendly, reported Reid to Blaine, and “had no objection to re-opening the question of admitting American salted meat in France, and he would like to settle it to our satisfaction.” Though Spuller was a free trader, the recent elections had not really changed matters: “The tendency of the new Chamber seemed to be strongly in the opposite direction,” despite the fact that French republican politicians ought to have favored “cheap food” for their constituents. And there remained, of course, the problem of America’s 30 percent tariff on French art.

  Throughout the summer, Cody had endeared himself to one and all with his many acts of generosity. It had long been his custom to set aside blocks of free seats for the less fortunate, especially the young. In New York, newsboys got free admissions to the show; in Paris, it was one hundred orphans from the Auteuil orphanage, or a group of apprentices, or young soldiers. While Major Burke wrung all possible publicity from such beneficence, it was genuinely true to Cody’s character.

  Annie Oakley told of the time the Wild West show was playing New York’s Madison Square Garden. “Business had been bad for several weeks, and a more worldly man would have been worried ill. . . . The show had just finished and as was our custom we were leaving by the stage door to get a little supper at a nearby restaurant. There were three of us, my husband, Buffalo Bill, and myself. Gathered at the door were twenty or thirty of the most tatterdemalion and hopelessly mendicant down and outs I ever saw anywhere—the riff of a continent. It was snowing and everyone else was rushing for shelter. But Cody stopped and made the habitual movement into his pockets for the money. It wasn’t there.” Oakley and her husband between them scraped together twenty-five dollars—a large sum—and gave it to him. “With that he turned and said in the most cheerful and wholehearted manner: ‘Here boys, here’s a dollar apiece. Go get a square meal and a bunk. It’s too rough for a fellow to cruise around out here in the blizzard this night.’

  “There were twenty-three of them, which left us just enough for a frugal fare. Of course he paid it all back in the morning.”

  That fall Oakley and Frank Butler mourned the sudden death of their friend and fellow marksman Ira Paine, who had been in Paris dazzling audiences at the Folies Bergère. As Butler had written on September 10 to the shooting community about Ira Paine: “A few days ago he spent the day in my company and talked cheerfully with Miss Oakley of things past. Two days ago, after his regular performance, he was taken with cramps, but gave another entertainment the next evening. Last night, he was unable to appear and this morning died. . . . He was a great favorite here. It was his eighth engagement in Paris. He left a reputation that no one in his line will ever eclipse. . . . May he rest in peace.”

  With the World’s Fair winding down, Buffalo Bill graciously allowed three hundred Scots to hold their Highland Games in the Wild West arena on the Thursday and Friday afternoons of October 17 and 18. Promptly at 3:00 p.m., the bagpipers in tartans and kilts strode in, ignoring the wet weather. The Sioux Indians, in full show paint, filled the covered upper tiers of the bleachers and smoked cigarettes and applauded heartily as eleven brawny Scottish chiefs vied with one another in “tossing the caber,” a giant log-throwing contest. There followed footraces, the Highland fling, wrestling, and the famous Highland dance known as Seann Triubhse.

  Rastignac of L’Illustration, ambling like a true flâneur through the Exposition Universelle, lamented its inevitable end and the imminent departure of the Algerians, the Congolese, and the Annamites, all mainstays of the colonial exhibits on the esplanade. “In the front of the Tonkin village, leaning against the bamboo fence,” he wrote, “an Annamite worker spoke of his joy at returning home, to the shop in Hanoi where he makes and sells his paper lanterns shaped like fantastic creatures. Forty-five days on the sea, a bad sea. ‘At Colombo, sadly, in coming,’ said the worker, ‘an Annamite died . . . bad, bad, the sea.’ But, at the end of the voyage there is his country, a poor straw hut perhaps, but still the hearth of his father. This boy is 19. His parents await him. There have been too many days when he has seen nothing but the wan faces of Parisians—some bored, some gawking, others curious, and some just plain boorish. He longs to behold the wrinkled faces of his elders.”

  The myriad fair exhibitors had waited expectantly for the awarding of prizes for various bests of the fair in a variety of categories, and so it was inevitable that when on September 29 the Exhibition Jury had published its list of 33,000 winners in every possible category, those passed over felt slighted. A reporter for the weekly American Register strolling the fair aisles was amused to discover that some “have given vent to their disappointment by placing placards on their stalls worded in more or less bitter language; several others by displaying their goods upside down, etc. The administrators, however, will not tolerate these proceedings and threaten with legal measures any exhibitors not complying.”

  The Parisians now found every excuse possible to attend the soon-to-close Exposition Universelle. Litterateur Edmond de Goncourt, having returned from vacation, now began regular forays to see the fair’s more esoteric exhibits. On Friday, October 11, toward dusk, he paid a visit to the Forestry Pavilion, where the fading light had an enchanting effect: “For me, it was truly like entering into a magic palace, built by woodland fairies, its towering columns fashioned from the mammoth trunks of ancient trees, each of the most subtle colors of the wings of night-flying moths. I could not tear my eyes away from the huge mottled birch tree, with its whitish spots, or the wild cherry, trimmed with ribbons of knots, reminiscent of an intricate armoire designed by Labelle, and then there was the towering beech tree pillar, speckled, flecked, as if lime had been blotted on something glossy, creating such beautiful grays, or the noble giant spruce, with its bark seemingly sculpted all over with little round leaflets, or the old gray poplar with its beautiful greenish tone, the very shade you find in the amorous drawings of the seventeenth century.”

  As the October days ticked by and the end of the wonderful fair loomed, a campaign arose for it to remain open a bit longer. Finally, on October 12, the fair commissioners capitulated, agreeing to extend the fair an extra week, which would round out its duration to exactly six months. “We have the Exposition till November 6!” exulted Rastignac. “It’s the big news of the week. Six extra days of this fairyland. And an All Saints’ Day that will be a fair day.”

  On his next foray de Goncourt wandered the realms of Asia. “Cambodian antiquities. These monsters with bird beaks who have the quality of coming from the Plesiosauric age, these sphinxes in the form of dog-headed gods, these elephants like odd snails, these griffons that look like the ferocious flourishes of a calligraphy gone wild. . . . This whole world of stone has a hallucinatory quality that isolates you for a moment from your time and your humanity.” The next Saturday, de Goncourt was visiting the Pavilion of the Equator when he encountered “A head the size of a large nut, which still had its hair, and of which one read: Real head of an adult Indian, shrunken by a process known only to certain tribes.” Once back out in the walkways of the fair, de Goncourt recoiled in horror from the surging crush of people. The weekend crowds were surpassing 350,000 a day! A fair whose managers had hoped for attendance of twenty million now expected more than thirty million.

  Those who came at the fair’s end did miss one of its most exotic sights: the Javanese dancers. On Tuesday, October 22, re
ported the weekly American Register, “The Javanese kampong broke up and its inmates left on Wednesday for Marseilles on their homeward voyage. They were given a farewell banquet on Tuesday night and a bronze commemorative medal presented to each of the natives by the Exhibition authorities.”

  Like many locals, de Goncourt returned to the fair every few days, wandering the Forest Pavilion again to rhapsodize over the rare trees, to marvel at the “strange plants of Mexico,” and to complain about the Annamite theater he attended: “I find no other description than this: the howling of cats in heat at the middle of musical alarm bells.” He was also displeased and puzzled that the fair’s cafés were busily dismantling themselves even as huge crowds sought sustenance. “They are starting to look like those makeshift sheds for eating and drinking that were improvised in the early days of [gold rush] California.”

  American writer Henry James was among the late arrivals. “I relented in regard to the exhibition,” he wrote his brother William, “and came over [from London] in time for the last fortnight of it. It was despoiled of its freshness and invaded by hordes of furious Franks and fiery Huns—but it was a great impression and I’m glad I sacrificed to it. . . . I shall have been much refreshed by my stay here, and have taken aboard some light and heat for the black London winter.”

  As for Mr. and Mrs. James McNeill Whistler, ever fashionably contrary, still they tarried in Amsterdam.

  In these final days of the fair, the erudite and well-traveled Vicomte Eugène-Melchior, Vicomte de Vogüé, came to see its ultimate value as providing a glimpse of a new modern world: “In this monumental chaos which has arisen in the Champ de Mars, in these edifices of iron and of decorated tile, in the machinery which obeys a new dynamic power, in these encampments of men of every race, and above all, in the new ways of thinking which suggest new ways of living, are to be seen the lineaments of a civilization which is as yet only outlined, the promise of the world which will be tomorrow.”

  In fact, de Vogüé, fascinated as he was by the mingling of so many peoples and cultures, gravitated to an exhibit featuring a huge rotating globe: “Here all is truth: the form, the motion of the globe, the immensity of its oceans, the red lines of great voyages, and the discoveries of cities and countries. . . . We will go up in the elevator. It leaves us at the North Pole. With its diameter of about forty feet the Earth presents a really imposing appearance. . . . A spiral staircase leads to the opposite pole, and as we slowly descend it, colored wires permit us to trace on the revolving globe the lines of navigation, of railroads, of telegraphs, and the wanderings of famous explorers. Clusters of nails mark the principal veins and mines of metals—the color and material of the nails indicating the kind of metal. When I expressed my surprise that the great mountain chains were not brought out in stronger relief, it was replied to me that to keep the proportion exact the highest peak of the Himalayas required only an elevation of about one-fortieth of a foot. This must be very humiliating to the Alps and Pyrenees.

  “Along the adjacent walls a succession of placards gives in large figures the statistics of the different countries of the world. I learned that China has about seven miles of railroad and the American Union about 140,000, and I understood without any other comment the actual march of civilization around the globe. . . . Another table recalled to me that there are nearly five hundred millions of Buddhists in the world, one-third of humanity; that increased my consideration for the bronze Buddha which smiles in the vestibule of the Palace of Liberal Arts.

  “Let no one exclaim over my weakness for this great plaything. By very puerile means, I grant, it suggests grave thought, rectified errors, and establishes knowledge.”

  Meanwhile, in London and America, discussions continued regarding ways to surpass the achievement of the Eiffel Tower. Sir Edward Watkin announced the purchase of a site and prizes for the best design for a permanent tower: “The designs must show a tower 1,200 feet high, which is 200 feet higher than the Eiffel Tower. . . . [I]t will be useful for astronomy and meteorology . . . and how pleasant to lunch to-day under the clear blue sky, far above the fog.”

  In the United States, where the wrangling had begun over which city would win the planned 1892 World’s Fair, the Chicago Tribune envisioned a 1,600-foot-tall tower “which will cause the Eiffel Tower to hide its diminished head.” Inside the 400-foot-wide structure two spiral roadways would circle gradually heavenward to the 225-foot-wide top, one conveying horse-drawn carriages, the other propelled cars. But perhaps the oddest of the various towers proposed to out-Eiffel Eiffel was a gigantic swinging structure. Though not much taller than the Eiffel Tower, it would move in a complete upright semicircle, providing a “thrilling aerial flight” to the one thousand persons in a large car. When vertical, it could stop for however long people wished to enjoy the view. “To put the comparison in a nutshell, this Powers Tower will carry people to a greater height than the Eiffel Tower and give them, in addition, an aerial ride which almost takes one’s breath away merely to think of. . . . The swinging tower will also serve the additional purpose of transporting people from one part of the fair grounds to another.” As Eiffel once memorably observed, “On verra.”

  November rolled in, wet, raw, and cold, but still the crowds swarmed the Paris fair. The final Sunday of the Exposition, torrents of rain pummeled the sightseers and the somewhat bedraggled grounds, which were full of gaps from all the departed exhibitors. “The rush for the Decauville trains on Sunday was so great,” reported the Paris Herald, “that several people, in their anxiety to obtain seats, were pushed on to the line. One young lady was knocked down just in front of an approaching train, and being unable to get up in time to save herself, was crushed to death by the engine.”

  Still, neither the foul weather nor the absent exhibits, nor the dismantled cafés nor the tragédy involving the visitor could dampen the holiday atmosphere. “The [fair] grounds, when not presenting the appearance of a collection of small lakes, offered a capital imitation of dark pea soup, yet the good tempered Parisians and Parisiennes plodded through it all and returned to their homes with not only the satisfaction of having a last look at the great World’s Show, but with very substantial samples of the Champ de Mars upon their clothes and themselves.”

  On Monday, November 4, Vicomte de Vogüé and his Russian wife ascended the Eiffel Tower to spend some pleasant hours with Gustave Eiffel in his civilized aerie. Below they saw only gray rain clouds. Before descending, this scholarly former diplomat signed the Livre d’Or: “With a last thank-you to my friend Eiffel, who has simply made a great thing.” A week before, Eiffel had entertained Wladimir, the Grand Duke of Russia, at a champagne lunch. When they noticed a workman place a ladder at the flagstaff overhead, Eiffel climbed up it to best his own previous record—reaching a new height of 302 meters.

  Tuesday, November 5, the Exhibition’s second-to-last day, dawned rainy, wet, and miserable, with clouds blotting out the top of the Eiffel Tower. Still, “crowds of people anxious to have a last look flocked to the Champ de Mars. . . . In the morning, the proportion of better class visitors was comparatively large, but in the afternoon the ‘people’ predominated. The rain fell heavily and rendered circulation anything but agreeable.

  “There was, however, considerable gaiety. Many of the principal exhibitors had invited their friends both in and outside the show to call and have a farewell glance at the marvels now so soon to be distributed to the four corners of the globe.

  “The English and Americans were especially busy in this direction, and leave taking and feasting seemed to be the principal occupation of the day. . . . The brasseries along the terraces were crowded from noon. The strange orchestras with their strangely costumed performers performed with a vigor that indicated that they were none the worse for their six months’ labor, but by a singular coincidence they one and all seemed to find it necessary to remind visitors that the entertainment was about to close. A large trade was done in ‘tombola’ [lottery] tickets, which were offer
ed freely all over the grounds.”

  The nocturnal Eiffel Tower ablaze with light

  On Wednesday, November 6, the rain cleared for the Exposition’s last day. Festive crowds poured in for a final visit and that night’s closing ceremonies. “What a crush there was! Everybody was there with his wife and family, and everybody was happy . . . and all enjoyed themselves in true, peaceful Parisian fashion. There was no drunkenness and no brawling.” When evening descended, a brilliant full moon rose high in the sky, and the mood was magical. “The big Eiffel Tower and all the big domes and all the little towers and the little domes drew themselves to their full height . . . turning on all their gas power, candle power and electric light power, seeming to say to the little world beneath:—‘Now take a good, long look at us for you’ll never see us again.’ ”

  At nine o’clock, all eyes turned to the Eiffel Tower, where thousands of fireworks transformed the world’s largest structure into “a glowing mass of red fire. . . . [At the tower’s base,] the fountains shot up their jets of liquid fire in green and violet and red; thousands of Chinese lanterns hung in festoons and clusters from trees and bushes; a solid army of men and women, with here and there a bright eyed, happy child, swayed to and fro, laughing, chatting, and revelling in the beauties around them; in the distance stretched the river, its banks outlined in rows of light, and from the opposite bank the Palace of the Trocadero, with its curving wings, shone like a palace of diamonds. Meanwhile, the full moon, sailing along in a clear sky, did its part in the general illumination.”