Paris: The Novel (15 page)

“One should be faithful,” Thomas answered with a smile.

Young Luc shrugged and said nothing.

It was in May 1886 that the competition was announced. It was not before time. There were only three years to go before the centenary of the French Revolution, which was, as all Frenchmen knew, the most significant event—with the possible exception of the birth of Christ—in the history of humanity. It was imperative therefore that Paris have another great exhibition. And at the gateway, the Republic wanted something dramatic. Nobody knew what, but it had to be a structure that would make the whole world gasp. On the first of May, the city asked for submissions. And they wanted them fast.

The plans soon started coming. Many were banal. Some absurd. Some structurally impossible. One, at least, was dramatic. It proposed a towering replica of the guillotine. This however was deemed a little grim. Would the world’s visitors really want to walk under a vast, hanging blade? Perhaps not.

And then there was the proposal from Monsieur Eiffel.

He had originally suggested the project some time before, but the city authorities had been uncertain. The huge iron tower he proposed was certainly daring. It was modern. It might be a bit ugly. But as they viewed all the entries now, one thing above all impressed the committee. After the complex construction of the Statue of Liberty, it was clear that Gustave
Eiffel the bridge-builder knew what he was doing. If he said the thing could be built, then he’d do it.

All Paris had been following the competition. When the winner was announced, there were many protests. But when Thomas Gascon saw it in the newspaper, he knew at once what he wanted to do.

“I’m going to work with Monsieur Eiffel on his tower,” he told his family.

“But what about your job with the railway?” his mother demanded.

“I don’t care.”

They’d need a lot of ironworkers. He intended to be first in line.

Sometimes Thomas worried about Luc’s character. Had he been too protective of his little brother?

Luc had taken his advice. At school, he’d become the boy who made the other children laugh. Recently, his face had started to fill out, and together with his dark hair he looked more Italian than ever. He was clever, and worldly-wise. But it seemed to Thomas that Luc was also in danger of getting lazy, and soft. And he privately resolved to do something about this. It was part of his secret program that, one Sunday that October, he took Luc for a strenuous walk.

The mid-morning sun was on the autumn leaves when they set off. Luc had looked up at the clouds scudding in from the west, and told Thomas that he thought it was going to rain, but Thomas had told him not to be silly, and that he didn’t care if it rained anyway.

In fact, when he’d woken up that morning, Thomas had thought he might be starting a cold, but he wasn’t going to let a small thing like that distract him from the more important business of toughening up his brother.

“I’ll take you somewhere you’ve never been before,” he promised him.

Descending the hill of Montmartre and walking eastward, they crossed a big, handsome canal that brought water to the city from the edge of the Champagne region, and soon afterward were walking up the long slope to their destination. The walk made him feel good, and by the time they reached the entrance, he felt he had shaken off his cold.

Though Baron Haussmann had built many handsome boulevards, his most delightful project was not a street at all, but a romantic park on the city’s eastern edge. The Buttes-Chaumont was a high, rocky outcrop,
about a mile north of the Père Lachaise Cemetery. Formerly it had been a quarry like Montmartre, but Haussmann and his team had transformed it into a rural retreat in keeping with the spirit of the times.

If the formal gardens of Louis XIV’s reign had given way to the more natural landscaping of the Age of Reason, the nineteenth century was enjoying a rich duality. On the one hand, it was the age of steam, iron bridges and industry. Yet in the arts it was the high romantic period. And while Germany had given the world the cosmic themes of Wagner, romantic France was more intimate and picturesque.

They entered through one of the western gates. The winding paths led through glades planted with all manner of trees and bushes, many of them still richly colored. In the middle of the park a small artificial lake surrounded a high, rocky promontory on the top of which a little round temple had been built. It looked like a scene out of some lush, Italian landscape painting.

They had brought some bread and cheese to eat in the middle of the day, and a bottle of beer. But before beginning their picnic, they agreed to visit the park’s best-known attraction. Crossing to the island by a long, suspended footbridge, it took them little time to find it.

The grotto was a magical spot. Situated just inside a small cave in the rock face, its high chamber was festooned with stalactites. Still more striking, a high waterfall cascaded water from sixty feet above into a pool at the back, from which it flowed away over rocks. If a nymph from classical mythology had suddenly appeared from behind one of the grotto’s rocks and started dancing with her companions, it would hardly have seemed surprising.

And most wonderful of all, it was artificial. The cave was the entrance to the old quarry. The stalactites were sculptures. The waterfall was created by hydraulic engineering. It was romantic, certainly. But the romance was not that of forest and cave and majestic mountain. It was theater.

“Perhaps,” said Luc mischievously, “the maiden you’ve been seeking lives here in the grotto. Wait a minute and she’ll come out of the waterfall.”

“Let’s go and eat,” said Thomas.

They crossed the bridge again and followed another path until they came to a green lawn, where they sat down. High above the island, they could see the craggy peak where the little temple stood. All around them,
the leaves on the trees were gleaming gold. They ate their bread and cheese, and drank their beer. Thomas stretched out and looked up at the sky.

There were more gray clouds than before. He watched idly as a large bank of clouds approached the sun, screened it in a haze and then obscured it. He waited for the cloud to break, but it didn’t. He felt a draft of colder, damper air and heard a light rustle in the leaves. The leaves weren’t golden anymore, but had taken on that strange, luminous yellow color that he’d often noticed when there was electricity in the air. He stood up.

“It’s going to rain. We’d better head home,” said Luc.

“Not yet. We’ll visit the temple first.”

Luc looked up at the high crag.

“That would take a while,” he said.

“Not long,” answered Thomas. “Let’s go,” he commanded.

They crossed over the bridge to the island again. And then they took the steep path that led them up the hill. It was quite picturesque, like climbing a mountain ravine, and Thomas was happy even if Luc was not.

They were halfway up when, from the west, they heard a distant rumble of thunder.

“Let’s go back down,” said Luc.

“Why?” said Thomas.

“Do you want to get caught in a thunderstorm?”

“Why not?” said Thomas. “Come on.”

So they continued up the steep and winding path until they emerged at the little round temple. And just as they did, they heard the thunder again, and this time it echoed and reverberated all around the huge, broad valley in which Paris lay, so that if he hadn’t felt the wind from the west, Thomas would hardly have known where the weather was coming from.

The temple was a small folly, modeled on the famous Temple of Vesta in Rome. From this high vantage point, Thomas could see the broad summit of Montmartre, and looking to his left, between high trees, he glimpsed the towers of Notre Dame in the distance. He knew there were many strange figures on the top of those towers: Gothic gargoyles and all manner of stone monsters, looking out over Paris, and it pleased him to think that, perched up here on this crag, he might be as high in the sky as they were.

The gray clouds were overhead now, but a few miles to the west was a great line of darker clouds. Beneath it, a curtain of falling rain stretched
across the city. Above it rose layers of black cloud banks. As Thomas gazed at these, he saw a flash within, followed by a crack of thunder.

The curtain of rain was advancing up the far side of Montmartre. On the hilltop, the tall scaffolding on the site of the rising Sacré Coeur stood out like a group of gallows. And while Thomas watched, the big site seemed to dissolve, and the hill with it, as the rain swallowed them up.

Then came another flash; and this time, with a tearing crack, a great stanchion of forked lightning snaked down the sky and struck close by the towers of Notre Dame. And as Thomas imagined the stone figures up there, staring out at the storm while the lightning crashed around them, their faces quite unmoved, he smiled to himself.

The storm was coming swiftly toward them now, over the rooftops, over the canals. Luc called out that they’d better seek shelter, but Thomas didn’t want to. Ever since he was a little boy, he had loved the electric excitement of thunderstorms. He didn’t know why. The rain began to pour down on them and Luc stood under the temple arches in a futile attempt to keep dry, but Thomas stayed where he was, standing on a slab of rock, letting the rain pound on his head. The rain was coming so hard that he couldn’t see the park below. The storm was directly above the park now. A huge bang shook the air as lightning struck a tree not a hundred paces away, but while Luc cringed, Thomas kept his feet planted, testing himself, proving that a poor young man in workman’s boots could dare the gods of the storm to strike him down, like a romantic hero.

Ten full minutes passed before the rain slackened a little and Thomas and Luc descended the hill and began their walk home. It was raining all the way, and Luc complained, but Thomas trudged firmly on, knowing that he must make a man of his brother.

So he was quite annoyed when, the next morning, he woke with a sore throat. By noon, he was shivering.