In 1899 an angry huddle of Parisian writers and artists signed a letter in which they denounced the arrival in their beloved city of a vast and hideous object: a monstrous tower, designed and erected by an engineer named Eiffel. 

By allowing the abomination to be built, the signatories insisted, Paris was guilty of “making itself irreparably ugly and bringing dishonour to itself”, and was now henceforth cursed to live under “the odious shadow of this odious column of bolted metal”. ..

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