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A new coat for the Iron Lady
LONG before the British could discover the qualities of an ‘Iron Lady’ in Margaret Thatcher, Parisians were familiar with the term ‘la Dame de Fer’ which they had been affectionately employing for nearly a century to qualify the world’s most visited tourist attraction situated in their beloved city. This year the Eiffel Tower is celebrating its 120th birthday and early morning visitors who looked up on Tuesday, March 31, were surprised to see so many tiny ants creeping all over its colossal lacework columns.
What looked like moving insects from below were in fact workers giving the world famous landmark its 19th coat of paint since it was inaugurated in 1889. The herculean task was being accomplished painstakingly by agile young men using handheld brushes, stroke by stroke. The facts relating to the exploit are staggering.
The whole operation will cost four million euros and the 25 men doing the job had to undergo six weeks of intense training at a circus school before being authorised to buckle up their leather harnesses and hoist themselves up, using ropes, at various heights of the more than 300metre tower. Once up there the rest is just brushes and buckets, and not a drop of paint allowed to escape and fall on the visitors below.
There has never been a serious accident during the past 18 painting jobs and Pablo, an en thusiastic Spanish worker who has been hired for the current assignment, says all is set to go well once again. Doubtless inspired by the unusual experience, Pablo tends to wax poetic: “Once you are up there, you forget your life down on the earth. You are suspended in your harness, brush and paint bucket in hands, feet pressed against the ironwork. When you look up your vision is limitless and you belong to the world of a blue sky, silver clouds and the birds sailing past you; and the silence is majestic! Inevitably, you start singing or whistling as you work and you are all by yourself in this big, wide universe.” There are 250,000 square metres to be covered and the use of a spray gun would mean losing a colossal quantity of paint in the air, not to speak of it falling on the heads and shoulders of the tourists. “You cannot imagine closing down the Tower for the painting job”, explains an official, “as more than seven million people line up to visit it every year.” The Iron Lady is given a fresh coat every seven years — 60 tons of paint on each occasion. By the time a new layer is due seven years later, a lot of paint is lost in the void through wind and dirt friction. Still, in these 120 years after the 19th coat, some 250 tons of paint — 1/40th of the Tower’s own weight — will remain stay put, clung to the latticework iron beams.Experts esteem at some point it would be necessary to be gin a titanic scraping project to divest the Tower of all this paint. But that would also mean closing the visits for at least five years, they say.
The idea of painting the Eiffel Tower itself is a fascinating tale of an evolutionary stream of events. Gustave Eiffel, whose brainchild the monument is, originally was not interested in aesthetics. The tower was only supposed to highlight French savoir faire in engineering at the international industrial fair that year and was not at all envisioned as a permanent or even a long-term tourist attraction.
So when it was inaugurated it was wearing only a light coat of anti-corrosion material and was intended to be dismantled soon after the exposition was over. To Eiffel’s ( and everyone else’s) amazement, the stream of visitors was unending year after year and by 1892 more than two million of them had already seen it and more were coming everyday. So he decided to give his creation an orange-brown layer of paint, the better to reflect the changing light through the day … and through the seasons.
As the years went by, the architect-engineer Gustave Eiffel could now feel he was entering a more artistic phase in his career and was convinced that a visitor looking up through the entire height of the Iron Lady could only appreciate her true grandeur if her shades changed gradually — from a deeper tint at the bottom to varying degrees of lighter hues towards the top.
When a new coat was due in 1899, Eiffel the artist decided this time the colours would grow from a deep orange at the base to a glimmering yellow at the crown, imparting to the Iron Lady a more elegant, slimmer silhouette. He was not wrong. By the time Paris hosted the next international show in 1900, many millions more had visited the structure.Actually it took a lot of vision and no mean amount of obstinacy on the part of Gustave Eiffel to hold on to his idea. The day the Tower was inaugurated, a letter in a Parisian newspaper had warned ominously: “For many years to come we shall see, stretching out across the streets of Paris, an ugly black presence, the odious shadow of this ungainly column put together with nothing else but course, riveted iron plates.” The letter was signed, among others, by the musical composer Charles Gounod, the architect and creator of the Paris Opera and the Monte Carlo Casino Charles Garnier and the writer Alexander Dumas.
To commemorate the event Paris is hosting an exhibition on Gustave Eiffel’s life and career at the Hotel de Ville from May 6 through August 31 this year. Don’t miss it if you happen to be here. Entry is free. ¦ The writer is a journalist based in Paris.
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