Free Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build the Statue of Liberty by Elizabeth Mitchell

Eugénie.
    Napoléon III decided in de Lesseps’s favor, determining that the khedive should pay 3.8 million pounds to de Lesseps for breach of the original agreement. The khedive, honor-bound, did so. De Lesseps then used the khedive’s money to hire workers and finance the invention and creation of astounding digging and dredging machines. De Lesseps, not the Egyptians, earned great accolades for his visionary thinking. As a friend of Bartholdi’s later wrote, the large dredge and conveyors created to make the canal were “the highest expressions of modern industry. You will see machines as grandiose as cathedrals and as precise as Greenwich marine watches. I visited one which did the work of 300 workers with only fifteen men; it extracted 80,000 cubic meters of earth in a month.”
    The pavilion also held two table-height dioramas about twenty-five feet by ten feet, showing how the canal would stretch from Port Said in the North past Ismailia to Port Suez in the South. On one wall hung a large painting of a female fellah, a slave, carrying a jug of water and a baby. This image represented the Suez Canal Company, almost as a logo, which Bartholdi clearly noted.
    Bartholdi managed to meet the khedive during the latter’s Parisian visit, to see if he might pitch his own talents. He would have found nothing terribly impressive about the khedive in person. Ismail the Magnificent was short, flabby, plagued by eczema, and observed the world through literally half-closed eyes whose focus tended to float to the side, creating a disconcerting effect on whomever he might be speaking to. What he possessed, though, was access to unlimited resources. He’d commissioned an extensive rail infrastructure remodeling, building of new palaces, and an entire new quarter of Cairo to be modeled on Paris. Gaining favor from the khedive would let Bartholdi skip the headache of public subscriptions and small government subsidies to create his work.
    In conversation, the khedive, who spoke fluent French, was clever and warm, if cynical. When Bartholdi discussed the idea of erecting a monumental statue for Egypt to crown the engineering achievement of the yet-to-be-completed canal, the khedive did nothing to discourage Bartholdi’s ambition. After all, as no money or contracts changed hands, the khedive had nothing to lose in the arrangement.
    What figure could Bartholdi create that would strike awe in the khedive? Monuments tended to blend into their surroundings over time. His General Rapp made a respectable commemoration of the hero in the square in Colmar, but nothing about the piece would lead observers to wonder what kind of genius created such a landmark. Bartholdi wanted to astound, to put his viewers in the frame of mind he had experienced when he was in Egypt, to encourage them to contemplate the eternal. He needed to devise a work that would appeal to the ego of the khedive, a man who would later tell a writer, “Every man has a mania. My mania is stone.” He also needed to find an idea that would impress Mariette, the khedive’s director of antiquities, the man who had unearthed the tombs below the sphinx and put on the temple display at the expo.
    Bartholdi’s first idea was a fountain and a monument to Muhammad Ali, the late leader whom de Lesseps’s father had cultivated to rule Egypt. The monument would be a rounded pavilion, with an enormous turbaned statue sitting cross-legged on a lion’s back on the roof. In another version, the lion would recline in Muhammad’s lap. Perhaps Bartholdi never presented these projects to the khedive. He didn’t mention having done so in his letters, instead opting to propose a much bolder idea.
    Bartholdi dreamed of a lighthouse. This lighthouse would recall the Colossus, a statue of Apollo that had towered over the harbor of Rhodes. With its pedestal, Bartholdi’s statue would be nearly forty feet larger than that ancient work, the tallest statue ever made. The statue of St. Carlo