Gustave Eiffel: A Private Life

1922, Rue Rabelais, Paris

The room is too small for the life they keep compressing into one outline, and I will not have it. They have given me quiet, servants who move carefully, visitors announced in softened tones, a desk placed near the light, and all the little mercies by which old age is supposed to mistake reduction for peace, yet I know the other work going on beyond the windows and in the newspapers and in those drawing rooms where people say my name as if they were already pointing upward with one gloved finger and stopping there. The tower, always the tower, as though bridges did not carry trains still, as though iron had not answered me long before Paris learned to dress astonishment as patriotism. I sit here in Rue Rabelais with my hands still serviceable enough to command a page, though not for as long as once they commanded crews and yards and offices, and I tell myself, as I must, that if I set the account correctly before me, if I arrange the sequence, if I keep the gaze where it belongs, then the structure of my life will not vanish into that single silhouette. I have depended too long on being seen to tolerate being simplified instead.