the balloon would be flaccid because of the gas lost in the interim. Santos-Dumont could think of nothing to do as No. 1 plummeted. He feared that the cords connecting the basket to the balloon would snap one by one. He looked down, and the sight of the housetops, “with their chimney pots for spikes,” made him queasy.
“For the moment,” he wrote, “I was sure that I was in the presence of death…. ‘What is coming next?’ I thought. ‘What am I going to see and know in a few minutes? Whom shall I see after I am dead?’ The thought that I would be meeting my father in a few minutes thrilled me. Indeed, I think that in such moments there is no room for either regret or terror. The mind is too full of looking forward. One is frightened only so long as one still has a chance.”
But then he realized that he did have a chance. A charitable wind was sweeping him away from the rocky streets and jagged roofs toward the soft grassy pelouse of Longchamp, where a few boys were flying kites. He shouted to them to grab the two-hundred-foot guide rope and run with it as fast as they could against the wind. “They were bright young fellows,” he recalled, “and they grasped the idea and the guide-rope at the same lucky instant. The effect of this help in extremis was immediate, and such as I had expected. By this maneuver we lessened the velocity of the fall, and so avoided what would otherwise have been a bad shaking-up, to say the least. I was saved for the first time!” The boys helped him pack everything into the airship’s basket. He secured a cab and returned to the center of Paris.
He immediately put the troublesome aspects of the flight behind him, like a mother forgetting the pains of labor once she has seen her newborn’s face. “The sentiment of success filled me,” he recalled. “I had navigated the air…. I had mounted without sacrificing ballast. I had descended without sacrificing gas. My shifting weights had proved successful, and it would have been impossible not to recognize the capital triumph of these oblique flights through the air. No one had ever made them before.”
That night he celebrated at Maxim’s, the famous restaurant at No. 3, rue Royale that is still in business today. He was one of Maxime Gaillard’s first customers, when the dark-wooded bistro opened in the early 1890s. The restaurant initially catered to carriage drivers who passed the time while their bosses dined elsewhere, but soon they too discovered its fine, hearty cuisine—French onion soup, oysters on the half shell, poached lobster, sole in brandy sauce, roast chicken, scallops of veal, grilled pigs’ feet and tails—and displaced the coachmen. As a night spot for the well-to-do, Maxim’s was ideally located in the center of the city, on the same block as the Automobile Club, the aristocratic Hotel Crillon, and the elite Jockey Club. Maxim’s attracted what working-class Parisians derisively called des fils à papa, rich young men who spent their fathers’ money on women and wine. When it came to the wine, Santos-Dumont fit right in. Maxim’s did not serve lunch in those days. The restaurant opened at 5:00 P.M. for the evening aperitif, dinner was served from 8:00 until 10:00, and supper from midnight until dawn.
Santos-Dumont always came for supper and sat at the same table in the corner of the candlelit main room. With his back to the wall, he could watch everything that transpired, and the goings-on in the wee hours of the night were legendary. A beautiful blonde who became a silent movie star used to shed all her clothes, climb onto one of the tables, and sing torch songs. A Russian named Aristoff arrived every morning precisely at four and consumed the identical meal: grilled kipper, scrambled eggs, minute steak, and a bottle of champagne. For his bachelor party, a French count ordered the waiters to dress up as undertakers and arrange the tables to looks like funeral biers. Maxim’s was the spark for many romantic assignations. In the 1890s strangers rarely approached each other directly but flirted with their eyes across the dining room. Many couples got together because of the intervention of the notorious “Madame Pi-Pi,” who sat outside the bathrooms and cleaned the toilets after each use. A woman who was interested in a man would excuse herself to the toilet and slip Madame Pi-Pi her address or phone number along with a tip. When she returned, the man could go to the bathroom and pay Madame Pi-Pi for the information.
Santos-Dumont dined alone or with close friends like Louis Cartier and George Goursat, better known by his nom de plume Sem, who carved the Brazilian’s likeness on the restaurant’s wall. At Maxim’s Santos-Dumont met James Gordon Bennett, the American millionaire publisher, who had the most prominent table in the front of the restaurant. Bennett owned the New York Herald and the Paris Herald, the only English-language daily in the city. He had an odd sense of humor, which infused his papers. For instance, he ordered the New York Herald to print the same letter to the editor day after day for seventeen years—an 1899 note from “Old Philadelphia Lady” who wanted to know how to convert centigrade temperatures into Fahrenheit—because he enjoyed hearing from readers who pointed out the repetition. Bennett was a fan of fast cars, slick yachts, and hot-air balloons. He assigned a reporter to cover every trial of Santos-Dumont’s airships. The Herald, with its hundreds of cliff-hanging stories about his perilous flights, made Santos-Dumont a celebrity in the United States.
On the days when Santos-Dumont planned to fly, the kitchen at Maxim’s packed him lunch. H. J. Greenwall, the author of I’m Going to Maxim’s, described the Brazilian’s routine: “Out to the hangar to get Santos-Dumont I tuned up for a flight; lunch put in the wicker undercarriage in which the pilot flew. Up in the air went Santos-Dumont I; usually some minor accident or incident occurred. Back to the hangar. Back to his apartment,” at the fancy address of No. 9, rue Washington, on the corner of the Champs-Elysées, near the Arc de Triomphe. “Back to Maxim’s … all night; leave in the dawn with a lunch of say a wing of cold chicken, a salad, and some peaches. A short sleep. Then to the hangar and up goes Santos-Dumont again.”
[CHAPTER 4] DYING FOR SCIENCE PARIS, 1899
AT THE CLOSE of the nineteenth century, Santos-Dumont was the only person flying powered airships. (Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin in Germany was building a mammoth, 420-foot-long semirigid airship—a fabric-covered, aluminum-strutted hull that housed fifteen separate gasbags—but it had not yet gone aloft.) Santos-Dumont’s fellow aeronauts were still ascending in spherical balloons, and not always successfully. In 1898, the London Evening News challenged balloonists to make it across the Channel from London to Paris. A man named A. Williams, after months of waiting for a favorable wind, planned to take off on November 22. When he was nearly ready, “a slight accident took place,” the paper said, “which delayed matters, and the start was postponed for an hour.” It seems that while the balloon was being inflated, it was somehow driven against iron railings and ripped. Once the tear was repaired and the inflation completed, Williams discovered that the balloon was not capable of lifting two companions, as he intended, so only one, a Mr. Darby, accompanied him. After an hour they descended into a tree and then briefly rose again.
Finally, after having traversed a distance of not one quarter of that from London to Paris (and, by the way, not in the right direction), it was found that the balloon had not sufficient power to proceed, and a descent was attempted near Lancing. Then it was found that this balloon, supposed to be replete with everything that practical aeronauts could suggest, had not a single anchor on board. The aeronaut, not wishing to be carried over the sea, then adopted the extraordinary course of swarming down the guide rope, leaving his unfortunate companion to follow. Relieved of Mr. Williams’ weight, the balloon started to rise again, and the passenger found himself in the awkward predicament of either having to jump some 50 ft. down, or be wafted out to sea. He chose the former, and though badly injured, was lucky enough to escape with his life. The balloon disappeared over the Channel, but was found some days afterward in France.
Mr.
