la dame de fer

Her timeline has a new entry this week on Wikipedia:

14 September 2010

Both the Eiffel Tower and Champ de Mars were evacuated following a bomb threat. And after a search of the area, no bomb was found. The tower and Champ de Mars were reopened the next day.

What was the caller thinking? 

Hitler failed both to reach her summit (the French cut her cables) and to engineer her destruction (placed the order but did his General listen?).  Scheduled for dismantling in 1909, after her World’s Fair permit ran out of time, she’s still standing tall more than a century later.  Even the pen—mightier than the sword, right?—has left nary a scratch on her reputation.  Guy de Maupassant—one of my now-sleeping literary icons whose tomb I searched for in vain at Montparnasse (I wonder where Gustave Eiffel is buried?)—reportedly ate daily in one of her restaurants, saying this was the only place in Paris without a view of the monument he so disdained.  Alexandre Dumas (I’ve read his The Count of Monte Cristo in French and lived to tell about it) would have agreed with him . . . I don't!

I think my favorite Wikipedia tidbits (had heard most before but love this free exchange of mostly correct information) are the full glass ones. Like the first entry in her timeline there:

10 September 1889

Thomas Edison visited the tower. He signed the guestbook with the following message—

To M Eiffel the Engineer the brave builder of so gigantic and original specimen of modern Engineering from one who has the greatest respect and admiration for all Engineers including the Great Engineer the Bon Dieu, Thomas Edison.

Or maybe the reminder about those awesome World War I Taxis of the Marne (her communication powers were tapped for that initiative).

In my own personal timeline will be forever etched these two dates:

August 2, 2010: the day I kept my promise to return to Paris and my first view of our dame de fer in her evening splendor . . .

August 6, 2010: the day I rode to her summit and gazed down at her city, wondering what that lovely green park at her feet was called, about its history. . .

Champs de Mars . . .  How could I not have known?

I know now J !