To Capture What We Cannot Keep

To Capture What We Cannot Keep by Beatrice Colin

In 1886, Caitriona Wallace and Emile Nouguier meet in a hot air balloon above Paris. They feel an affinity for one another, but when the balloon lands, their different social positions become apparent. Caitriona (Cait) is a widow who has agreed to chaperone two wealthy, spoiled, and out-of-touch-with-reality Scottish charges, Jamie and Alice Arrol. Emile is one of the engineers building the Eiffel Tower. His mother expects him to take over the family business and find a suitable wife in order to maintain his bourgeois respectability and stability.  As the tower is constructed, Cait and Emile must decide how important their love for each other is.

This first passage is from the hot air balloon ascent. "And there, far below, were Baron Haussmann's wide boulevard's that followed the line of the old walls of the city, the green blot of the Bois de Boulgone, the pump of black smoke from the factories in the south, the start spokes radiating from the Place de l'Etoile, and, closer, the Place du Trocadero. And there were lines of carriages as tiny as black beetles, people as minute as ants, the city as small and regular as a set of children's stone building blocks placed on a painted sheet" (17-18).

I loved this description because now the Eiffel Tower is such an iconic part of the Parisian landscape. It's hard to imagine Paris without La Dame de Fer. Though the Eiffel Tower provides one of the best panoramas of Paris, the one thing you cannot see from atop the tower is the tower itself. My favorite vantage point to look out over Paris is from the top of Sacre Coeur or from the top of the Arc de Triomphe.

I also likes this passage about leaving a beloved city, especially Paris. "The morning they had left Paris the sky had been a fathomless blue, the air so clear and clement that everything they were about to leave behind -- the streets, the people, the smell of roasted coffee and chestnuts -- seemed sharper, the colors deeper and more saturated, the verticals and perpendiculars of the city engraved rather than drawn" (108). I find leaving Paris bittersweet, but in order to return, one must leave.