Why did Guy de Maupassant have lunch at the Eiffel Tower’s base restaurant every day?

Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant was a French writer, remembered as a master of the short story form, and as a representative of the naturalist school of writers, who depicted human lives and destinies and social forces in disillusioned and often pessimistic terms.

While most people have always found the Eiffel Tower charming and romantic, there was a group painters, poets, writers, and all different kinds of preeminent artists who lived in and admired Paris but despised the colossal iron tower even before it was built. They called themselves the Committee of Three Hundred.

Guy de Maupassant, who was among the artist protesters, apparently never accepted the Tower and its presence. Defeated by the Tower and annoyed by its immense popularity, de Maupassant couldn’t stand the sight of his “iron arch nemesis,” which seemed to follow him whenever he wanted to stroll around the center of Paris.

At last de Maupassant thought of a safe place where he could avoid the Tower that he obviously despised so much: underneath the Eiffel Tower itself. Every day, he had lunch at the Tower’s base restaurant, just because “inside the restaurant was one of the few places where I could sit and not actually see the Tower!”