A GOOD 20-minute walk from Paris’s Arc of Triumph will take you to n°25 rue de Chazelles. The dull and nondescript grey six-storey apartment building will most certainly fail to attract a second glance from you and there is least likelihood you’ll pay any attention to the rather smallish, rusting memorial plaque on the wall to your left.

By late 19th century the main Paris was huddled along the two banks of the river Seine and rue de Chazelles, which is today in the heart of a bustling area, had plenty of space for the architecture firm Gaget, Gauthier & Co to find 3,000 square metres for storing their construction material and for offering their technicians and labourers a comfortable line of work.

The company had already earned a reputation in 1873 by its admirable restoration job on the Vendôme column, which was nearly destroyed by the revolutionaries. (Remember private detective Maurice Chevalier taking photos from the top of this column of the wrongdoings of American playboy Gary Cooper in Billy Wilder’s 1957 classic ‘Love in the Afternoon’?)

But, to come back to our story, nobody paid any attention when Gaget, Gauthier & Co announced they were going to build a statue to be offered to the American people as a gift from France for the 100th anniversary of the US Declaration of Independence. This was to be placed at an appropriate point to be chosen later in Washington. When the news reached Edouard de Laboulaye, a French jurist and intellectual, he jumped upon the idea and proposed a project that surpassed all limits of imagination.

He discussed it with sculptor Auguste Bartholdi, who immediately started working on creating the tallest statue of a lady ever built in history. Parisians gasped in disbelief when they heard that the colossal monument, to be called ‘Liberty enlightening the world’, would stand at the southern tip of Manhattan.

But the copper-plate work of art needed a sturdy and concealed wrought steel structure to hold it upright. Who else could do that better than Gustave Eiffel, the man who would come up a few years later with his own wonder in Paris, the Eiffel Tower.

The monumental project was started and the first part to be ready was Lady Liberty’s raised arm holding the torch. The next to come out of the workshop was her head wearing the crown. It was the main attraction at the International Fair in Paris in 1878 and visitors paid five centimes each to climb the inside staircase. A left bank intellectual wrote later in his newspaper diary with characteristic irony: “I went into Lady Liberty’s head yesterday. I wasn’t surprised to see she has no brain.”

By the summer of 1883 the Statue of Liberty had risen up to waist level and n°25 rue de Chazelles had become the hottest tourist spot in Paris. Writer Victor Hugo was curious enough to visit the unfinished work and enthusiastically took the trouble to climb the now two-storey high inside staircase. He came out dazed, shaking his head and muttering again and again: “Glorious, glorious.”

Lady Liberty finally rose to her full height in early 1886. She was then dismantled into 350 parts, the entire mass weighing 204 metric tons that was hauled by ship to the New York harbour. Putting her assembled on a pedestal on Bedloe Island required another four months of hard work and the inauguration finally took place on Oct 28, 1886, a delay of ten years, three months and twenty-four days, but worth all the trouble in every possible sense of the word. Bedloe was later renamed Liberty Island in 1956.

Originally shining pink in colour but today appearing milky green with the natural patina that protects her copper skin from oxidation, Lady Liberty stands 93 metres tall holding her flame enlightening the world and looking across the ocean in the direction of France. She is visited by four million people every year.

Gaget, Gauthier & Co produced three smaller versions of the Liberty, two of which can still be seen in Paris on an island in the Seine and in the Luxembourg garden. The company also made many miniature models that were immediately popular and were called “gadgets”, hence the birth of a new word in practically all European languages.

There also exists the very first terracotta version, made by Bartholdi himself, at the Blérancourt museum in France. The controversy is far from over as to which woman had originally inspired him. Some claim the statue represents Bartholdi’s wife and the others say it was his mistress. But many are convinced, given the authoritative expression on Lady Liberty’s face, that it was his mother.

The writer is a journalist based in Paris.

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