FRANCE NOV 2,1870 PARIS PL. DE LA BOURSE TO AVRANCHES BALLON MONTE COVER

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FRANCE NOV 2,1870 PARIS PL. DE LA BOURSE TO AVRANCHES BALLON MONTE COVER:
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In September 1870, at the height ofthe short Franco-Prussian War, more than 200,000 Prussian troops and cavalryopened what would become a five-month siege of Paris. Most of the troops ofNapoleon III were captured or bottled up elsewhere, but before their inevitablesurrender, Parisians led by such notables as Victor Hugo raised a spiriteddefense. The Louvre was emptied of its treasures and converted to an armory,and city leaders cleverly found military uses for civilian businesses andpastimes. Among their innovations: using balloons to carry mail and militarydispatches over enemy lines.

The first balloon launch was carried out on 23 September, using theNeptune, and carried 125kg (276lb) of mail in addition to the pilot. After a three-hour flight it landed atCraconville83km (52mi) from Paris.Following this success a regular mail service was established, with a rate of20centimesper letter. Two workshops to manufacture balloons were set up, one under the direction of Nadar in the Elysềe-Montmartre dance-hall ,and the other under the direction of Godard in theGare d\'Orleans. Around 66 balloon flights were made, including one that accidentally set a world distance record by ending up in Norway.The vast majority of these succeeded: only five were captured by the Prussians, and three went missing, presumably coming down in the Atlantic or Irish Sea. The number of letters carried has been estimated at around 2.5 million.

In his memoir, Gaston Tissandier described flying over thePrussians and hearing bullets \"hiss and whirl\" below his basket(Gaston Tissandier, Souvenirs et récits d\'un aérostier militaire de l\'armée dela Loire, 1870-1871, Paris: M. Dreyfous, 1891/Colorized by Vertis).

Not yet a century old, balloon travel was a Frenchspecialty, with Paris home to the vaunted Vaugirard balloon factory. GastonTissandier—a chemist, adventurer, and ballooning pioneer—quickly volunteeredfor the hazardous messenger duty. The cargo on his first trip included morethan 175 pounds of letters, as well as a few carrier pigeons to deliver returnmail to the city. Tissandier recorded this flight in his memoirs,Ina Balloon! During the Siege of Paris: Memories of an Aeronaut, translatedinto English for the first time here. The excerpt has been edited for space andreadability.

On September 30, at 5 in the morning,I left home with my two brothers. When we arrived at the Vaugirard factoryfloor, my balloon lay there on the ground like an old lump of rags. It wastheCéleste, a small balloon of 900 cubic yards that had beengenerously donated by its owner in support of the military cause. I bent downto make a closer inspection.

Damn it all! What a deplorable stateof disrepair! There had been a deep freeze the night before and the cold had setin to the balloon’s fabric, making it hard and in places cracked. Great God!And what did I spy adjacent to the intake valve? Holes large enough to run yourfingers through. Farther up, the envelope was riddled with a constellation ofpunctures. This wasn’t a balloon; it was a soup strainer.

Just the same, the flight crew soonarrived to inflate and ready the airship. Working with these men was a skilledtailor from the city who, armed with his needle, began dutifully repairing thedamage. One of my brothers brought out a pot of glue and a pencil and beganapplying paper bandages to the small holes that presented themselves to hismeticulous investigation.

What did it really matter? I was onlymoderately mollified by these ambitious efforts. The truth was, I was to leavevery shortly in this cruel contraption, crumbling with age and misuse.

My thoughts were suddenly shatteredby the crack of cannons at the city gates; my mind envisioned the Prussian gunsthat awaited my airship, ready to spit out rivers of bullets in my direction.

By 9 a.m. the balloon had been filledand the basket attached. I fastened on the extra ballast and loaded threebatches of mail. A cage containing three pigeons made its way to my balloon.

“Look here,” said Roosebeke, the mancharged with their care. “Take care of my birds; upon landing offer them bothwater and wheat seed.”

As I climbed aboard my balloon, thecannons exploded once more at the city gates. I embraced my brothers andfriends and thought of the soldiers fighting and dying only steps away. My soulfilled with the cry of the country in need; my destiny now was to deliver whathad been entrusted to me. This was my solemn moment, and no other thought coulddelay me.

“Lâchez tout!Let hergo!”

At 10 minutes to 10, I floated at analtitude of 3,000 feet, my eyes never letting go of the countryside below,where I observed a most disturbing sight that I will never manage to get out ofmy head as long as I live. There, where once existed the happy and animatedoutskirts of Paris, where boats passed slowly by and rowers waved their oars, adeserted expanse spread outward, stripped of all life and color. Not a man or acar to be found on the streets, no trains making their way over tracks. Theruins of bridges stood like vestiges of lost civilizations, not a single boatupon the steady Seine, who stayed true to her course, rippling across the nowrazed and bleak landscape. Not a soldier, not a sentinel, nothing, nothing, andas quiet as the grave! Like a stranger stumbling upon some forgotten city ofold, it took some work to imagine again the two million souls trapped not faraway behind the city’s walls.

By 10 a.m., the sun’s warming rayssteadily increased my altitude; the gases within theCéleste,expanding in the heat of the new day, now began to seep out from valves justabove my head, their strong, intermittent odors stunning me at times.

I then heard a slight rustling fromthe sides of the gondola and remembered my passengers, the pigeons, just nowbeginning to jostle their cages. They looked at me anxiously, perhaps fearingthe worst.

The full sun with no cloud to obscureit shone upon the balloon, and the heat became stifling. I took off my overcoatand wished for a drink of water to quench my thirst. Managing to sit down on apallet of mail, I rested my elbows on the edges of the gondola and contemplatedin silence the great panorama that spread itself before me.

While a thousand thoughts racedthrough my mind, my compass reminded me the wind was continuing to pull mewestward. After Saint-Cloud appeared Versailles, slowly revealing the wondersof its monuments and gardens. Up to that moment I had passed over only desertedruins, but now the scene changed to a verdant park. Below I could make outPrussian camps. I was at 5,200 feet and well beyond the range of rifles. Iarmed myself with a spyglass and peered over the sides of the gondola for acloser look at the Lilliputian armies below.

Soon enough I spotted officers comingout from Trianon Palace. They watched me for quite some time until I noticedsudden movements in all directions. The agitated soldiers running back andforth appeared like ants on an upset mound, crisscrossing the same lawn whereLouis XIV once strode. They were pointing up at theCéleste, and Irelished the moment, knowing that in their anger and haste they were utterlypowerless to stop the delivery of the parcels beneath me.

At that same moment I remembered the10,000 proclamations printed in German that needed delivering. Grabbing ahandful of these missives, I threw them overboard, where they spread out likeleaves in flight and floated slowly down to earth. I bombarded the officers andsoldiers below with hundreds upon hundreds of the tracts, saving the rest forthe other enemy troops I was likely to encounter.

What did the salutation say? Simplewords to the German armies that the French people were no longer burdened byemperors or kings and that if they were to show the same common sense and joinus, we would no longer need to kill one another aimlessly like wild beasts.Strong words that fluttered lightly in the morning breeze.

Under an ardent sun, theCélestemaintainedan altitude of 5,200 feet without my having to release an ounce of ballast; yetthere was little doubt that the balloon was leaking, and without theexceptional atmospheric warmth of the day the poor craft would not remain longin the air and would soon enough fall quickly back to earth, perhaps in themiddle of the Prussian hordes.

Tissandier and his brother, Albert, were renowned scientists andaviation pioneers (Henri Thiriat/Library of Congress).

LeavingVersailles I floated over a small forest. In the middle of the wood a distinctclearing had been cut, the ground tamped flat and a double row of tents erectedon either side of the perfect parallelogram. I had only just passed over thiscamp when I suddenly noticed soldiers below making a formation; I could seeclearly from that height the gleam and flash of bayonet tips as rifles wereraised and all at once cracked out shots in a plume of smoke.

It was only a matter of secondsbefore I heard somewhere below the basket the hiss and whirl of bullets and thedischarge of even more shots. Sure enough, after surviving the first hail ofbullets I was soon greeted by a second and then another, and still yet another,one following the next in steady succession until the wind at last carried meaway from that inhospitable place. For every round I had been subjected to, Ihad replied with a veritable deluge of leaflets rained down upon my attackers.

I did not care to hang around longenough to waste any more of the Prussians’ gunpowder; other horizons awaitedme. I was soon swiftly advancing toward a distant forest. I cannot say I wasnot somewhat concerned to notice that theCélestewas losingaltitude; I began to jettison ballast bit by bit, with precious little to workwith. Unfortunately at that moment I had not made it far at all from theoutskirts of Paris. The warm welcome I had just received from the region’snewest inhabitants did not bode well for a forced landing.

I have always noticed, and notwithout surprise, that the aeronaut even at considerable heights remainssubject to the landscape over which he is flying. If he is hovering over thechalky hills of Champagne, he feels the intense warmth of the sun as reflectedfrom the ground, like the passerby warmed by the sun that radiates from awhitewashed wall. Conversely, if he is sailing over the treetops of a forestfloor, the air traveler finds himself surrounded in the cool humidity of theliving things below, as if he were suddenly entering the coolness of a caveduring the height of summer. This was precisely what I experienced at 10:45that morning as I passed 4,700 feet above the treetops, which I soon recognizedas the forest of Houdan. My compass and map left no room for guesswork. Thesudden chill that I had felt after basking in the sun most of the morning wasalso felt by my balloon, which cooled and contracted, sinking toward the treesbelow as if the branches called out to it. Was theCélestenowlike the bird in flight seeking a branch to alight upon?

I quickly emptied a ballast sackoverboard but the barometer continued its descent; the cold now chilled me tothe bone. The balloon descended to 3,300 feet, then to 2,600, then to 2,000. Iemptied three of my ballast bags, only to level out at 1,600 feet above thetreetops, with the balloon still refusing to gain altitude.

At that moment I found myselffloating over the intersection of two roads. I could make out below a group ofmen who had assembled in the road.Grand Dieu!They werePrussians. And then farther along, more of them; and then uhlans [lancers] whowere moving along the roads.

I had only one sack of ballastremaining. I threw into the void my last packet of proclamations. But theballoon had lost much of its gas; I was now floating a mere 1,400 feet abovethe ground, well within range of rifle shot. I kept a close watch beneath me.If a soldier raised his rifle in my direction, I was resigned to heave down apacket of letters on his head. Lightening my load in this way would havecertainly helped my balloon find its wings again. No matter my desire to completemy mission in full; I would not trade my life for a pack of letters.

Lucky for me the wind was swift and Ishot like an arrow over the treetops; the uhlans peered up at me, so astonishedby my passing overhead that not a shot was fired. I continued on my way oververdant prairies hemmed in by aubepine hedges.

By noon I was barely passing a fewhundred feet above the ground. The spectators who gathered beneath me now wereclearly the French people of the countryside, as indicated by their blouses andsabots. They raised their arms as I passed overhead as if to call me to them;but being still close to the forest’s edge, I preferred to sail on for as longI could maintain altitude. I contented myself by throwing out several stacks ofParisian newspapers to these good people.

Soon enough a small town rose uponthe horizon. It was Dreux, with its tall, square tower. TheCélestedescendedquickly now, and this time I did not object. A cloud of townspeople soon ranafter the still-hovering airship. I shouted down to them with all my might:“Are there any Prussians around here?”

A thousand voices responded inchorus: “Non, non, descendez!No! No! Come down!”

I was now no more than 160 feet above the ground, and my guiderope scraped over the tops of fields. But seized by a sudden wind, the balloonwas abruptly caught up and sent on a collision course with a high adjacenthillside. The balloon briefly grazed the ground of the hilltop, causing abrutal shock that flipped the gondola completely upside down. I managed to takea good knock on the head that left me in some pain afterward. I could now seethat the balloon was descending far too quickly for a landing, so at last I cutaway the remaining ballast sack; yet I managed, in trying to do more than onething at a time during a solo flight, to lose hold of the knife, the same knifeI needed to release the balloon’s anchor. I had no time to mourn this botchedeffort, as theCélestehad now leaped 200 feet into the air,only to immediately come crashing back to the earth; this time however, Isucceeded in freeing the anchor and opening the main release valve. The balloonat last came to rest, and the people of Dreux, running out to see thecommotion, surrounded me on every side. I had managed to foul my arm and earn abruising bump on the head, but at last, I had also come to a full stop infriendly territory.

Ah! How happy I was to clasp the hands of all those who nowsurrounded me. They pressed me with questions of every sort. What has become ofParis? What do they think in Paris? Is Paris still resisting? To the best of myability, I attempted to respond to the thousands of inquiries that came fromevery direction. I then gave a speech to mark the occasion.

“Yes, Paris is still holding its head up before her enemy. Thereis no sense in searching that valiant population for weakness ordiscouragement, for all one may remark in that great city is an unbrokentenacity and an enduring fortitude. If Provence would follow Paris, then Franceshall yet be saved!”

Then with haste I deflated theCéleste, while localguardsmen arrived to push back the gathering crowd. A carriage soon arrived forme and was loaded with my bags of mail dispatches and cages of pigeons. Thepoor birds had been shaken by the landing and were not yet back to theirsenses.

Making my way to the carriage I received no less than 50invitations to lunch. I ate happily and with a good appetite and afterwardasked to be driven to the post office with my sacks of Parisian mail.

I laid them upon the ground and could not help but feel acertain emotion. There beneath my eyes were 30,000 letters from Paris. Thirtythousand families would think of the balloon that carried over the clouds newsof their besieged loved ones.