She Had Everything. She Climbed to the Top of the World. And Still Couldn't Escape Herself.
Most dollar princesses married a title and called it done. Alberta Sturges went up the Eiffel Tower and asked harder questions.
Paris, June 8th, 1900. Alberta Sturges is twenty-two years old, and she is at the Exposition Universelle with a companion named Gerald.
The Exposition—the great Paris World’s Fair of 1900, which drew fifty million visitors over seven months—is at its height. There are palaces of electricity, pavilions of every nation, a moving walkway along the Seine. Alberta has been attending Patrick Geddes’s lectures at the Palais des Congrès every morning, thinking hard about civilisation and progress and the six primitive types of humanity from whom all history flows. She has been to garden parties at the Duchess de Rohan’s house. She has been to fortune-tellers. She has been, for months, in what she calls “one long struggle with myself.”
And today, she and Gerald go up the Eiffel Tower.
The tower had been built eleven years earlier for the 1889 Exposition—Gustave Eiffel’s iron lattice rising three hundred metres above the Champ de Mars, the tallest structure in the world, controversial from the moment the first rivet was driven. Maupassant had called it an eyesore. Others called it the shame of Paris. By 1900 it had become something else: a symbol of the century just ending, of the industrial age at its most audacious, of the human capacity to build things that had no business standing.
Alberta went up. She looked down. And something happened.
She reached for her diary and wrote:
“Today Gerald and I went up to the exposition and saw many things. In our wanderings we went up the Eiffel Tower and as I looked down from this immense height—something came to me like a revelation.”
What followed was one of the most extraordinary passages she ever committed to paper.
