Adventure Lawyer’s cocktail party factoid of the day:
When the Eiffel Tower was originally proposed, the design was almost universally panned.
Alexandre Dumas raged “The Eiffel Tower is without doubt the dishonour of Paris. Everyone feels it, everyone says it, everyone is profoundly saddened by it.”
According to Roland Barthes’ essay “The Eiffel Tower,” French author Guy de Maupassant used to frequently eat lunch at the Eiffel Tower because “It’s the only place where I don’t have to see it!”
Obviously history decided otherwise, and the tower, which was originally intended to be a temporary display in celebration of the centennial of the French Revolution, continues to lure the imaginations of tourists today.