Bishop Wright was at the house to greet them, and Carrie Kayler (who had been married and was now Carrie Grumbach) was on hand to prepare dinner. Orville’s mind was “good as ever,” the Bishop would record that night, “and his body promises to be in due time.” A bed had been set up for him in the front parlor. As for herself, Katharine allowed she was “tired to death.”
In the days that followed Orville still required “a good deal of attention,” as Katharine recorded, but was “tolerably active,” able to stay up longer through the day, sometimes for several hours. A local surgeon who looked him over found his left leg had been shortened about an inch—not the one eighth of an inch he had been told at the Fort Myer hospital—but with proper padding in the heel of his shoe he should have no serious trouble.
Neighbors, old school friends, came to call on Orville. By the second week in November, Charlie Taylor was pushing him in the wheelchair to the shop on Third Street, where the engine from the Fort Myer Flyer had been uncrated for inspection.
“I have an awful accumulation of work on hand,” Orville told Wilbur on November 14, in the first letter he had written since the accident. Home and a little work seemed to do exactly what had been hoped. So improved was he in health and outlook, and such was his progress walking on crutches, that by late December he and Katharine were letting it be known they would soon be sailing together for France to join Wilbur, Wilbur having told them they were needed.
CHAPTER TEN
A Time Like No Other
Every time we make a move, the people on the street stop and stare at us.
KATHARINE WRIGHT
I.
Wilbur’s days at Le Mans had never been so full. In the months since Orville’s accident, he had become an even bigger sensation. Not since Benjamin Franklin had any American been so overwhelmingly popular in France. As said by the Paris correspondent for the Washington Post, it was not just his feats in the air that aroused such interest but his strong “individuality.” He was seen as a personification of “the Plymouth Rock spirit,” to which French students of the United States, from the time of Alexis de Tocqueville, had attributed “the grit and indomitable perseverance that characterize American efforts in every department of activity.”
The crowds kept coming to Le Mans by train and automobile and from increasingly farther distances. “Every day there is a crowd of people not only from the neighborhood,” Wilbur reported to Orville, “but also from almost every country in Europe.”
During the six months Wilbur was flying at Le Mans 200,000 people came to see him. The thrill of beholding the American wonder in action, the possibility, perhaps, even to shake his hand or be photographed with him, the constant fuss made over him by young and old, men and women, were all part of the excitement, as was the sight of prominent figures daring to ride with him in the sky.
First there had been the rotund Léon Bollée, then Hart Berg, and after that Berg’s wife, Edith, who was the first American woman to go up in a plane. To avoid the embarrassment of having her long skirts lifted aloft by the winds, she tied them around her ankles with a rope. On her return she said she had felt no nervous strain or “the least bit of fear.” Her admiration for “Mr. Wright,” strong as it already was, had increased tenfold by his master-working of the machine. She would be ready anytime, she said, to fly the English Channel with him.
A photograph of Madame Berg seated on the Flyer at Wilbur Wright’s side, beaming with pleasure in advance of takeoff, made an unprecedented magazine cover, and the famous Paris dress designer Paul Poiret, quick to see the possibilities in the rope about the ankles, produced a hobble skirt that became a fashion sensation.
Arnold Fordyce, who had led the French delegation to Dayton in 1906, took a turn to ride with Wilbur for a full hour, and for the chief of the French army’s aeronautical department, a Colonel Boutioux, Wilbur made several rounds at only 18 inches or so above the ground, which astounded everyone.
Another passenger, like Edith Berg, marveled at how “steady” was the entire time in the air. It seemed as if Wilbur and he were “progressing along an elevated track,” wrote an English officer and aeronautical enthusiast, Major Baden Fletcher Smyth Baden-Powell, brother of the founder of the Boy Scouts. But he was astonished, too, by the noise.
Mr. Wright, with both hands grasping the levers, watches every move, but his movements are so slight as to be almost imperceptible. . . . All the time the engine is buzzing so loudly and the propellers humming so that after the trip one is almost deaf.
A reporter from the Paris Herald took a turn, then another reporter from Le Figaro, then several Russian officers. The “accommodating attitude of this man that we took great pleasure in depicting as a recluse, is inexhaustible,” wrote the reporter from Le Figaro. Clearly Wilbur was having a grand time.
“Queen Margherita of Italy was in the crowd yesterday,” he wrote on October 9. “You have let me witness the most astonishing spectacle I have ever seen,” she told him. “Princes and millionaires are as thick as fleas on the ‘Flyer,’?” he added, knowing Katharine would love hearing that.
That women found him increasingly appealing became quite evident. One highly attractive Parisian lady, the wife of a prominent politician, spoke freely and at some length to a reporter on the matter, with the understanding that her name would not be mentioned.
Her first impression was not altogether favorable, she admitted. “M. Wright appeared a bit too rough and rugged. His expression was fixed and terribly stern.
But the moment he opened his lips to speak, the veil of severity vanished. His voice is warm, sympathetic and vibrating. There is a kindly look that imparts exceptional charm and refinement to his bright intelligent eyes. . . . The frank honest way in which he looks straight in the eyes of the person to whom he speaks, and the firm grip of his wiry, muscular hand seem to give true insight into his character and temperament. . . .
He impressed me as one of the most remarkable men I have ever met.
Having finished the number of test flights required by the French syndicate, Wilbur began training the first of three French aviators, as was also required. He was Comte Charles de Lambert, a slim, blond-haired Russian-born aristocrat, age forty-three, who spoke English and to whom Wilbur took an immediate liking. With the plane fitted out with a second set of levers, he would ride to Wilbur’s right. For his part Wilbur would sit with his hands between his knees, ready if necessary to take control.