Guest post written by Mademoiselle Eiffel author Aimie K. Runyan
Aimie K. Runyan is a multi-published and bestselling author of historical and contemporary fiction. She has been nominated for a Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers Writer of the Year Award, a Historical Novel Society’s Editor’s Choice selection, and a four-time finalist for the Colorado Book Awards. She is an adjunct instructor for the Drexel University MFA in Creative Writing program and endeavors to be active in the literary community in Colorado and beyond. She lives in the Rocky Mountains with her wonderful husband, two (usually) adorable children, two (always) adorable cats, and a dragon.
About Mademoiselle Eiffel: Claire Eiffel’s story of love, devotion, and the frantic pursuit to preserve her family’s legacy is not only an inspired reflection of real personages and historical events, but a hymn to the iconic tower that dominates the City of Lights.
Claire Eiffel is a remarkable woman who was largely lost to history. I suspect that most people who ascend the Eiffel Tower and see the wax figurines of the famous architect Gustave Eiffel and the American innovator Thomas Edison, they dismiss the blonde woman in the background as Eiffel’s kindly daughter who was there to serve coffee and biscuits and to ensure the men’s comfort was seen to when they discussed more weighty topics.
In truth, from the age of fourteen, Claire was charged with raising her four younger siblings and running the household owing to the early death of her mother. Aside from these expected duties, Claire was her father’s assistant and confidante in business as well as the domestic sphere. There is an abundance of correspondence between Claire and her aunt and grandparents during her first trip to Porto, Portugal where she went with her father to oversee the final days of the building of the Maria Pia bridge that express her worries for her younger siblings and provide a window into her personality, but in other key periods, like the months surrounding the building and opening of the Eiffel Tower, no such records exist.
The reason is simple: Claire was usually with her father and the other members of her family during that essential, and likely frantically busy, period of her life, so no correspondence was necessary… or indeed the family decided for reasons unknown not to preserve it. So that left me with the daunting task of recreating her life from what we knew of her father’s whereabouts and the struggles he was facing in the media and with the Parisian bureaucracy that was feverishly trying to protect themselves from any financial fallout if the tower project were to fail.
I was confident in one decision: whatever troubles Gustave Eiffel was facing, Claire was weathering them at his side. His struggles were hers, and she would have been strategizing how best to spin these various obstacles to the benefit of her father, the family, and the Compagnie Eiffel. She was deeply devoted to her father, this much is certain. She lived with him for the rest of his life even after she was married, she and her husband preferring to rent rooms from her father rather than set up a household of their own. I was very comfortable assuming that Claire was at her father’s side, and there is photographic evidence to corroborate this assertion, but to craft Claire’s story required extracting it from the shadow of her father’s.
My job was to extrapolate from what I did know about her and her father to be able to interpret her motivations and recreate the contents of her heart and mind in order to mold a believable and sympathetic character. I have no evidence, for example, that Claire was an artist, but it provided me with a way to give Claire both a link to her father’s world of design as well as ambitions and dreams of her own. It’s possible that a woman in Claire’s time might have been content to run a home and manage her father’s affairs, but I don’t think Claire would have been satisfied with such a workaday existence, nor would the modern reader be able to connect with a woman of such small vision for her life.
Constructing Claire’s story required a good deal of digging in the details of the lives of others to create a complete image because, like so many women in the past, their roles were seen as secondary or lesser than the men they supported. But I am fully convinced that without his daughter’s love and support, Gustave would have struggled to reach the heights, figurative and literal, he scaled to in his lifetime. It was a distinct honor to pull Claire’s story from the shadows and give her a much-deserved moment in the sun.
