Maupassant was one of a fair number of 19th-century Parisians, including Charles Gounod, Alexandre Dumas, fils, and Charles Garnier, who did not care for the Eiffel Tower. He often ate lunch in the restaurant at its base, not out of preference for the food but because it was only there that he could avoid seeing its otherwise unavoidable profile. He and forty-six other Parisian literary and artistic notables attached their names to an elaborately irate letter of protest against the tower's construction, written to the Minister of Public Works.