What he did write about in the days that followed, apart from all he reported on his dealings with Berg, Cordley, and the French, were the great buildings and art treasures of Paris, revealing as he never had—or had call to—the extent of his interest in architecture and painting.
Like so many seeing Paris for the first time, he could not get enough of it, and covered more ground on foot than ever before. The five to ten miles a day he walked on board ship would seem to have been only a warm-up. Whatever free time he had away from business, he was out and on his own way. It was spring in Paris, the chestnut trees in bloom.
From the Louvre to the Arc de Triomphe was nearly two miles of gardens and esplanades with thousands of statues, he wrote. He climbed the three hundred steps to the top of the Arc de Triomphe, walked the banks of the Seine to the Île de la Cité, walked to the Opéra, walked down the rue de Rivoli two miles to the Place de la Bastille. On a Sunday morning he hiked to the top of Montmartre, a distance of nearly two miles that included more than three hundred steps.
He loved seeing so much open space used to set off important buildings. “Paris is the most prodigal of land for public purposes,” he wrote in a long, descriptive letter to Bishop Wright. There was much to be learned from the French about how to place public buildings.
There is always an open space as big as a city square in front of each building. . . . And in addition there is nearly always a broad avenue leading directly to it, giving a view from a long distance. It is this, as much as the buildings and monuments themselves, that makes Paris such a magnificent city.
If only a city like New York were arranged the same way. Even New York’s skyscrapers, like the Belmont and Knickerbocker hotels, if properly set, would be “wonderful.”
He seems to have soaked up everything in view. And whatever he looked at, he looked at closely. Some of the landmarks were “a little shabby.” Half the gilding was gone from the dome of Les Invalides, where Napoleon was buried. The same was true of the pedestal of the Egyptian obelisk in the Place Vendôme and he was sorry to see so much of the statuary marred by black streaks.
He spent considerable time at the Panthéon, which, he explained to Katharine, was not used as a church but as commemoration of the great men of France. The dome seen from inside was “not much,” he decided—too high in proportion to its diameter, like looking into an inverted well—but the interior was “very grand.”
He took architecture seriously, thoughtfully, and made up his own mind, irrespective of whatever was said in his red Baedeker’s guidebook. Notre Dame was a disappointment. “My imagination pictures things more vividly than my eyes.” He thought the nave too narrow, the clerestory windows too high, the interior far too dark. “The pillars are so heavy and close together that the double aisles on each side form no part of the room when you stand in the nave.”
How amazing it was, he wrote in another letter, to see thousands of people dining on the sidewalks up and down the avenues, sitting at little tables outside restaurants, sipping wine and eating in the open air “right on the sidewalks.”
Often, as the time passed, he was himself dining handsomely, as the guest of Hart Berg. There was Boivins on the avenue de Clichy in Montmartre, Henri’s on the rue Volney, and the famous Café Anglais, where Wilbur enjoyed lunch with both Berg and Mrs. Berg.
He would fill his free time in Paris to advantage and with the same level of intensity he brought to nearly everything, making the most of every waking hour in what, for all he knew, might be his one and only chance for such an opportunity.
Of all that Paris offered, it was the Louvre that he kept going back to again and again, spending hours there and logging still more miles walking the long galleries. His description of the paintings he saw could go on for pages, a sign, it would seem, of how much interest in art there was at home as well, and with Katharine in particular.
He preferred the Rembrandts, Holbeins, and Van Dycks, “as a whole,” better than the Rubenses, Titians, Raphaels, and Murillos. His disappointment in the Mona Lisa was as great as it had been in Notre Dame. “I must confess that the pictures by celebrated masters that impressed me most were not the ones that are best known.” He much preferred Leonardo’s John the Baptist to the Mona Lisa. Above all, he was taken with the work of the seventeenth-century Flemish master Anthony Van Dyck.
In a letter written after a full afternoon at the Louvre, he moved on to a collection of nineteenth-century French masters, including Delacroix, Corot, Millet, and Courbet. “While I do not pretend to be much of a judge, I am inclined to think that in five hundred years it [the collection] will be recognized as some of the greatest work ever done.” What appealed especially about Corot was the way he painted the sky. The sky was his source of light.
Such keen interest as he had in art was not only remarkable in someone so committed to technical innovation, but a measure of a truly exceptional capacity of mind. As weeks, then months passed, Wilbur, of his own choice, visited the Louvre fifteen or more times.
What he did not report to those at home was the extent to which he was being scrutinized by the press, and the stir he caused at public occasions. Any hope of anonymity was already gone. To a reporter for the Washington Post who stopped him in the lobby of the Hôtel Meurice, Wilbur refused to say anything about his machine or his plans. When the subject turned to the difference between flying and going up in a balloon, Wilbur said he had yet to go up in a balloon, but that it was “entirely another thing from flying which affects one with intoxication. After having once flown it is almost impossible to turn to anything else.”
In mid-June he went with Hart Berg to see the balloon races at St. Cloud. Amid a particularly elegant crowd in which were to be seen Gustave Eiffel and the American ambassador, Henry White, Wilbur drew more attention than anyone. A reporter for the Paris Herald asked, “You are over here on pleasure, are you not, Mr. Wright?”
“To some extent,” Wilbur said. “I am enjoying myself splendidly and seeing all manner of new things.”
“You like Paris?”
“It is a marvelous city.”
“Mr. Wright talked carefully,” the reporter wrote.
It was obvious that he feared to be caught in a trap concerning his remarkable machine and what he wants to do with it. At the end of each question his clean-shaven face relapsed into a broad sphinx-like smile.
That this same American bicycle mechanic from Ohio was spending hours with the masterpieces of the Louvre was apparently not of interest to the press.