“The girl goes with the business,” said his mother simply. “It’s obvious.”

“You’ll just have to find another rich girl,” said Luc with a grin, but everyone ignored him.

So it was partly to escape his family for a while that, within a week of starting work on the tower, Thomas made an announcement.

“I think I’d better get lodgings closer to my work.”

“It’s only an hour’s walk,” his father pointed out.

“More than that. And the hours are long. Monsieur Eiffel’s got less than two years to build the tower.”

“You’ll be paying rent to someone instead of bringing the money home,” his mother said quietly.

“Just while I’m working across the river.”

He was being selfish and he knew it. Nobody said anything.

He found the lodgings without much difficulty.

In almost every house and apartment building in Paris, up in the roof, there was a warren of servants’ rooms, some of them garrets with windows, others hardly more than wooden-walled closets. Those not being used by servants could be let out by their owners to poor folk. An advertisement led Thomas to the house of an elderly gentleman who lived alone, with only a single servant, across the river from the building site on an ancient street named the rue de la Pompe, which worked its way up toward the avenue Victor Hugo. Having given proof that he was respectably employed on Monsieur Eiffel’s great project, Thomas was able to rent a tiny attic room with creaking floorboards, just enough space for a mattress on the floor, and a small round window through which he could look out at the surrounding rooftops. The old man asked a peppercorn rent, and it was only a short walk to the Pont d’Iéna, which gave straight onto the building site.

After that, Thomas went to see his parents every Sunday, and always gave his mother any spare money that he could.

Every morning, when he came onto the site, Thomas felt a sense of pride. As everyone knew from the newspapers, it was only three years since, in America, the 555-foot Washington Monument had surpassed the ancient pyramids and the medieval spires of Europe to become the tallest building in the world. But Monsieur Eiffel’s tower wouldn’t just beat the record. It was going to soar to almost twice that height—a triumph for France.

Yet the site was strangely quiet, almost deserted. In the huge open space, the tower’s four mighty feet looked like the stumps of some vanished fortress in the desert. And as the four spread legs of the tower began to grow from those feet, with the workmen up in the iron girders, the ground below was often nearly empty.

“Why is there nobody here?” a visitor once asked Thomas.