When I look out the window of my study and tilt my head slightly, like a pigeon, I can see the Eiffel Tower. It looks quite small from this side of the city, so it’s not in my way. I've even grown a little attached to it. As darkness falls, it shines its beacon over us every fifteen seconds, just like a lighthouse. When the tower was new, it was enormously in the way. Guy de Maupassant considered it such an eyesore that he organized a campaign against it. In an Open Letter signed by dozens of prominent writers and artists, he called the tower a gigantic, rickety skeleton and a skinny, ridiculous factory chimney that would forever ruin the distinguished face of Paris. Thanks to the inscrutable ways of French politics, construction continued anyway, and when the rickety skeleton was finished, De Maupassant regularly went to lunch at the restaurant on the first floor. When friends asked in surprise why, he was never short of a bon mot and said that it was the only place in the city where you couldn't see the wretched thing. The tower is now an emblem of Paris, just like Baron Haussmann's Grand Boulevards, which Charles Baudelaire railed against in vain a generation earlier. No one knows exactly what the city looked like before Haussmann demolished large parts and erected his long, somewhat monotonous rows of dignified apartment buildings. It is easier to picture the spot where the Eiffel Tower now stands. It was a muddy piece of land with small vegetable gardens, an eighteenth-century allotment complex. Later, it became a playing field, the Champ de Mars, where young officers of the École Militaire, including Lieutenant Bonaparte, could practice and parade. So, nothing was razed to the ground for the tower; only something very grand was added. When I had just arrived in Paris and did not yet have a study of my own, I often went to the Bibliothèque Mazarine on the Quai de Conti. The library belongs to the Académie française, an illustrious institution that is not hampered by false modesty and calls its most famous members Les immortels . Mortals are also allowed inside and, for €19 a year, make use of the city's most beautiful reading room. When I walked across the Pont des Arts to the metro at the end of the afternoon, I had to slalom around little blankets on which dozens of miniature Eiffel Towers were offered for sale. They were made of plastic or tin and not rusted to an honest brown, like the real tower, but painted gold or silver. Besides old books, the booksellers on both banks of the Seine always have all kinds of images of the tower in their stalls—not only real and fake old engravings, but also drawings and small paintings in all genres of kitsch, right down to neon paint. Anyone visiting Paris can take a trinket home. I have a special souvenir of my own, a memory dating back to long before I had ever been to Paris. In Velsen, I had a neighbor boy whom I looked up to because he was a few years older. He had built a model of the tower out of Meccano. It stood in a corner of the dining room at his home and almost touched the ceiling.