Auguste Lefèbre was exactly middle aged. That is to say, he was thirty eight and would die aged seventy-six on 1st June 1926, his birthday, in fact. And there, at the end of Rue de Nélaton rose (or fell) ‘La Tour de Babel’. To Monsieur Lefèbre it was a monstrous scaffold. What Guillotine had started, Monsieur Eiffel seemed hell-bound to continue. Distant sparks flew with the clanking of distant riveters high up there on their distant boards. A hundred years of progress locked La Terreur to La Tour like some great iron girder. Eiffel’s ‘squelette de belvédère’ was already half done, it would seem.
Auguste Lefèbre was struck by a sudden consideration that left him obliged to stop and stand at the corner of Rue Nocard dumbfounded.
“Ah, Monsieur Lefèbre. Ravi de vous voir ce matin. Est-ce que tu vas bien?” The greeting, the voice, barely distracted Auguste from his thought. “Monsieur Lefèbre, est-ce que tout va bien? Le vent d’aujourd’hui aggrave les choses. Le bruit. M. Lefèbre?”
Auguste glanced at his interlocutor and frowned. “Oui, oui. Why are they taking it down? La Protestation? Did the artists turn the matter?”
“Ils démantelent La Tour?” The waiter looked up the street and shook his head; he seemed on the brink of adding a word but offered no more than a shrug. He moved away to wipe the side of a table. “Le monde est fou, M. Lefèbre. Qu’est-ce qu’on se soucie?”