“Most of my life,” Thomas remarked to his children, “this hilltop was just a huge field of mud and wooden scaffolding. I used to wonder if I’d ever live to see the church finished. They didn’t take the scaffolding down from the big dome until you were born, Monique, when I was thirty-five.”

“And you were even more pleased to see me than the church,” she insisted.

“Except when you misbehave,” he answered genially.

The transformation of the site was almost complete. The platform, upon which the great Byzantine shrine stood, had been laid out as handsome terraces and flights of steps, like hanging gardens. A splendid statue of Joan of Arc gazed out over Paris from beside the church door. And though not visible to the eye, a subtler change had also occurred.

As four decades of republican government had gradually weakened the power of the Church, even the message of Sacré Coeur had been altered. Men like Father Xavier and Roland de Cygne remembered that it proclaimed the triumph of a conservative Church over the radical Communards. But most Parisians who nowadays gazed up at the shining white temple on the hill supposed that it was a memorial to the Communards’ heroism—a view which radical governments were glad to encourage.

Since living in Pigalle, Thomas Gascon usually brought his children up here a couple of times a year, and the ritual was always the same. They would wander over the top of the hill, visit the Moulin de la Galette where their uncle Luc had started work, visit the Maquis to view the house where their father had been brought up, and then complete the circle of the hill, walking by the little school where Thomas had learned to read and write.

For the first five years, the tour had always ended with one dramatic moment in front of Sacré Coeur before they descended.

Pointing across the rooftops of Paris to where the Eiffel Tower soared into the sky, Thomas would cry out: “Take a good look at the tower, my children, and remember. For it won’t be there much longer.”

Everyone had known. In 1909, the twenty-year license that Gustave Eiffel had been granted would be up. The city authorities would then order the tower to be dismantled. Even if he couldn’t be the foreman, Thomas had wanted to apply to work on that job. “I put that tower up, and I’ll take it down,” he used to say. But it would break his heart to do it.

So a chance meeting early in 1908 had brought him great joy. He’d been working on a project to the south of the Eiffel Tower, and if the weather was fine he would walk past the tower at the end of the day. One evening, he saw Monsieur Eiffel just ahead of him in the dusk. He couldn’t resist going up to him to pay his respects; and to his pleasure, Eiffel recognized him at once.