The Woman Who Rode the Wind

  “It’s called a drag rope,” he went on. “When I let it fall, it keeps the balloon at a certain altitude. The more rope that drags on the ground, the less weight in the balloon.”

  “How long is it?”

  “Three hundred feet. The drag rope can also tell you where you are at night—if you listen to it. When it’s over trees, the leaves rustle. Through cornfields it has the sound of rushing waters; in an orchard there is a little jerk as it leaps from tree to tree. Over a rail fence it imitates a buzz saw. On a housetop it’s a cello, when it hits a barn it’s a double bass, and in the water it splashes and then is smooth.”

  “Does it ever catch anything?” she asked.

  “There’s a legend about the balloon people,” said Alain. “One time, long ago, at a certain church, the people were coming out of mass when they saw a rope caught around one of the tombstones, stretched tight. That rope went up in the sky beyond the clouds.

  “They waited, and soon a strange man, looking like no one they’d ever seen, came down hand over hand to free it. The people seized him and he died. You see, he couldn’t live in our air any more than we could live under water.”

  Below her the earth was a concave saucer, the horizon lifting up to a rim that melted into a hazy sky. Nearby three clouds, looking as if they had business to the north, scudded silently by. Above them the artificial sky of white balloon captured the glow of the sun.

  “How can anything be this beautiful?” she said, forgetting her earlier fright.

  Alain looked back at her over his shoulder as if to say he understood. She had been initiated into a society where beauty was won only at the price of letting go of your fear.

  “There are those who say a balloon is just an overstuffed condom,” he shrugged, making light of the moment. “Did you know they’re made of the same material? But others say a balloon is magic.”

  It was magic: distant villages and woods, meadows and castles. Dots of white imbedded in green foliage became a cemetery. A train was a snail on a silver thread, shooting off little cannonballs that exploded long before they reached their height. The wail of the locomotive was very faint, and then it was gone. They had moved above the range of earthly sounds.

  “Most people don’t appreciate this,” Alain called back. “They’re like those people who held the airborne mariner on the earth until he died. One time, I was testing a gyrocopter...”

  “A what?” Mary Ann shouted over the noise.

  “I put a small gasoline motor with a propeller on it on my back and started it. It went up fast and came down even faster. I broke three ribs. While I was lying there, my superior, Major Vitary, came over and laughed at me. Told me I would never fly again. Today, when he visits President Pouchet, it will be my turn to laugh at him.”

  Alain pointed ahead. Mary Ann saw the dense fog of a cloud coming at them. The air was suddenly cool, damp and milky white. They had lost sight of the earth. They had lost sight of the balloon over their heads. Even their faces were indistinct.

  Then they were out again. Mary Ann squinted as she saw the sun. It was a brighter, purer light than she had ever seen from the ground. The trip through the cloud had caused the gas in the balloon above them to cool, and they had dropped a thousand feet. They heard dogs howl.

  “We are coming over the city,” said Alain. “The dogs can sense us.”

  Looking down, she could see the Eiffel Tower, closer now, the broad flat field of the Champ-de-Mars behind, framing it. The whole city was spread out under them in boxes and carrefours.

  “Take a look down there,” said Alain. “Houses piled on houses, a huge prison for a million people who’ve been told all their lives that they can’t do what they want—that they can’t fly. The only difference between them and us is, we don’t believe it.”

  He pressed the throttle and The Bitch did an aerial dance. Mary Ann was amazed. This was no sausage or jellyfish. Alain’s ship twisted and turned with utter grace.

  Then the motor cut out. Alain looked back, twisting in his seat as though he was sitting at a table. “Are you scared?” he asked.

  Mary Ann looked straight down. Nothing but an iron bar was beneath her feet. Nothing but Alain’s skill kept her aloft. And Alain, she reminded herself, was L’Homme Sauvage, “The Wild Man.” So why did she trust him?

  “A little,” she confessed.

  “One time when I was a boy in New Caledonia, I started to climb a cliff. When I got up 30 feet, I suddenly realized I was bending outward; the cliff was going straight up. I froze with my fingers in the rock, the crashing surf below me. I thought I was about to die.

  “I didn’t die, of course, but I’ve never forgotten that feeling. It was the most alive I’ve ever been. To me, fear is the most exquisite thing in the world.”

  He threw the rope all the way forward and the ship started to dive. Mary Ann caught her breath, wondering if it were her last one.

  Below, covering a whole city block, was an enclosure surrounded by a wrought iron blue fence with golden spikes. It was the Palais de l’Elysée, the presidential palace.

  Pouchet was taking no chances. There were guard posts at the 20-foot high gates. Inside under the trees, soldiers camped out in tents. Machine guns and a cannon with rotating barrels were mounted on the roof. Other machine guns covered the walls. The windows were barred against bomb throwers—should one get past the spiked fence.

  But guards, gates and fences meant nothing to Alain. He came in silently from the clouds and swooped down on the President’s palace like an owl about to pinion an unsuspecting bird, not even disturbing the soldiers who were brewing their morning coffee on the lawn. Mary Ann was amazed at his piloting. And she was scared. What was Alain going to do?

  They were 50 feet above the ground; only 10 feet above the top of the Palais de l’Elysée. They were moving toward their own shadow. She saw a small man emerge from the front door, followed by a crowd of others, all in dark coats. A soldier in a blue coat and red trousers was coming up the driveway to meet him.

  “Shall we give the President a salute?” asked Alain.

  He didn’t wait for an answer. He pulled out a flare gun and fired it. It went off with a bang. The sputtering flare rose in the air and popped.

  It was as though someone had dropped a firecracker in a squirrel cage.

  Shouts of “Who goes there?” came from all four sentry posts. Soldiers scurried about, bumping into each other, searching for the intruder, looking everywhere but up. The officer in the red pants had run behind a tree.

  “That’s Major Vitary,” said Alain with a chortle.

  Pouchet’s aide had pulled the President to the ground when he heard the gun go off. So Pouchet himself, lying on his back, saw Alain first. He pointed up. Alain waved at him.

  Blue coats swarmed out on the roof and cranked the cannon upward to aim at them. Machine guns swung around. Rifle bolts clicked. An officer seized a gun from one of the soldiers and aimed it at Chevrier.

  Mary Ann screamed.

  Alain simply sat there, hanging in mid-air. He looked back at Mary Ann, as poised and cool as if he were lecturing to a class.

  “You see, even though you are part of a system, it is necessary to challenge and even defy its authority. It is what makes us free.”

  She could barely hear the words over the din at the time, but she would remember them later. She could see that he wasn’t terrified the way she was. He was laughing. “He’s absolutely crazy,” she thought. And she knew in that moment that she loved him.

  Alain was facing down the officer who stood on the parapet of the Palace, aiming his rifle across the narrow void at him. The officer would have to either shoot or lower the gun. If he shot, as he wanted to, he would be shooting down France’s hope of winning the Meurthe Prize. Finally he lowered the gun.

  “This is restricted ground,” he bellowed, red-faced. “You have no right to be here.”

  Alain was not intimidated. “The ground may be restricted,” he shouted back,
“but the air is free.”

  Chapter Eleven: Paying Homage to Yvette—June 3

  Each day at dawn a new package would arrive. On the first day a basket of orchids, on the second, a box of Swiss chocolates. On the third, nothing, and she was annoyed. But, on the fourth, a small, but exquisite piece of Limoges china. Each of the packages was marked: “For Yvette.”

  Yvette Meurthe was accustomed to receiving gifts from admirers. But they always announced themselves, and expected something in return, even something so small as a smile. The mystery man who leaped the iron-spiked fence surrounding the Meurthe estate and then climbed to the second floor porch to leave his treasures outside her bedroom door was, to say the least, romantic. It reminded Yvette of that new play taking Paris by storm, the one in which the long-nosed man, pretending to be someone else, woos his lady from a darkened courtyard.

  Yvette set her maid to find out who the man was. It turned out not to be a man at all, but a scrawny 12-year-old boy. And because of his size, he looked even younger.

  The maid caught him the next morning delivering a package. He wouldn’t talk. She fed him two croissants, a brioche and a petit beurre. All of them went down fast. Then he talked.

  The boy had been sent by one of the “hommes oiseaux,” the birdmen who were flying to the Eiffel Tower. This man had seen Yvette and fallen in love with her. Which one? The boy said he didn’t know, but he turned his eyes to the floor when he said it. The maid didn’t believe him.

  Then Yvette came in. Her eyes sparkled and her dark hair shone from brushing. She asked him if he would like to have some milk.

  “Coffee,” said the boy. “I am a man now.”

  In the kitchen, while the cook ground the beans, heated the water, and then put the combination through a plunger, Yvette opened the latest package. It was a beautiful silver brooch with a note that said, “From A. Wear it if you care for me.”

  “Give me a hint,” she pleaded with the boy. Where was this strange man who had sent these presents?

  The boy pointed eastward, in the direction of the park that bordered the Meurthe’s home. Across the park, on the hills rising above the city, was Saint-Cloud, where Alain Chevrier was based. Alain! The man every woman in Paris wanted. Alain! Who despised society, wealth and privilege. Secretly sending an urchin to woo the most glittering woman in Paris. The maid giggled. What a story for her friends in the market!

  The boy hopped on his bicycle outside the gate and rode back toward Saint-Cloud. Yvette and the maid watched from her second story balcony until he disappeared.

  What would Yvette do about her new love? the maid asked.

  Nothing—for the moment. “Let him come to me,” Yvette said, looking across the park at the distant hills. “And he will.”

  The boy didn’t ride all the way to Saint-Cloud, though. He stopped much closer in the Bois de Boulogne near the twin man-made lakes, where a man standing under the willows was watching Yvette through binoculars.

  It was Maximilian von Hohenstauffen.

  “Did you let them catch you?” he asked.

  “Yes, the maid did.”

  “Did you tell them what I told you to say?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good,” said Maximilian. “She will be curious. And we will feed her curiosity with baubles. Let us see if she is wearing the brooch.”

  * * *

  Paris was a small town cloaked in the finery of a big city, like a little girl wearing her mother’s dress and wobbly high heels, Maximilian thought. Everyone knew everyone worth knowing, so it was simple to find out things, particularly about someone like Henri Meurthe.

  Maximilian already knew the details: Meurthe came from a distinguished family, leaders in France for generations. But Meurthe didn’t live off his inheritance, he was also a successful man on his own; he had invented a gasoline engine and made millions speculating in the new oil market.

  But not just a rich man, Maximilian thought, also a dangerous one. He had won medals for bravery, including his desperate balloon flight out of Paris in the winter of 1870, and he had killed a famous duelist in a sword fight one cold morning after the man had insulted his future wife’s honor.

  But everyone has cracks in their armor. Maximilian was a soldier, and a soldier attacks the enemy’s weakest point. Meurthe’s weakness was Yvette. She was his only child, and since his wife was dead, there would be no more. What would Meurthe sacrifice for his daughter? Probably everything.

  And no wonder. Yvette was one of the great beauties in a city that produced many beautiful women. When she entered a room children stood on the tops of chairs just to get a look at her. She was applauded at the theater as if she were one of the actresses.

  Yvette was stubborn, too, and willing to flout convention. She had once made an off-handed remark that she would like to masquerade for one night as a horizontale. She never did, but the comment sent many men to the nether reaches of Paris in search of a woman who looked like her.

  But legends can also be true. One time she and her friends had gone into Maxim’s, wrapped up the restaurant’s most expensive champagne in burlap sacks—the same way the workers bought their cheap wine—and drank it out of the bottle.

  Another time Yvette was at an outdoor cafe when it started to rain, and refused to move. Neither would her admirers. They sat through the downpour, continuing their party. Gradually the other patrons who had run inside for shelter came out and gathered around her. And then the sun reappeared, vindicating her.

  But there was also a darker side to her personality. Fabian Bouchard had told Maximilian that when Yvette was 15 and still at boarding school, she and another girl had fallen in love with one of the professors, who had encouraged both of them. The three-way tryst ended when the girls found out about each other, and Yvette threw the other girl down a flight of stairs. She would want what she couldn’t have, Max thought, and be determined to get it.

  And what did she want now? She had been fascinated with Chevrier the moment she saw him from the Eiffel Tower. Meurthe wanted Chevrier too, but not as his daughter’s lover. Chevrier meant “goatherd,” didn’t it? The conjunction of events, like the stars in their courses, always had its purpose, and could be put to good use.

  Maximilian watched through his binoculars as Yvette looked up, beyond him, at the heights of Saint-Cloud. She was beautiful, standing there with breasts embonpoint against the shimmering eau de Nil satin of her gown, her hair cascading across her delicate shoulders, the sun glinting off her new silver brooch, the one Maximilian had just sent her. The kind of woman he wanted, and would someday have. Her good bloodlines were obvious.

  But not now. Now he had a different use for her.

  Chapter Twelve: The Place of Grievances—June 5

  Mary Ann was also watching the hills above Saint-Cloud and thinking about Alain Chevrier. But there was no time for further visits, even if Neville Bishop would have let her go. They were assembling the aeroplane on the boat, working hard by day and even harder by night, tightening bolts and rigging guy wires by feeble lamplight.

  Then, in early June, a note came from Alain inviting Mary Ann—and Harding—to hear him speak at the Place de Grève.

  Alain received many invitations. He had been asked to speak in France’s House of Deputies, where he was being called “the keeper of the Oriflamme, France’s sacred banner, which he will carry for us into the skies.”

  Women—many women—sent him their gilt-embossed calling cards. Among them was a can-can dancer known as “La Goulue,” the Greedy Gal. Kings had drunk champagne from her shoe. Another was a famous demimondaine who, it was rumored, had sequins woven into her pubic hair. A third was Meg Steinheil, a notorious woman whose talents with lips and tongue caused a former president of France to have a heart attack and expire right in his office, his pants undone and his fingers frozen in her curly hair. Or so gossip had it.

  Chevrier had turned them all down, saying he was too busy. But he couldn’t refuse his mother Louise, who had
asked him to speak before the veterans of the War of 1870.

  Alain’s speech was at the Place de Grève—Place of Grievances— where workers had come in earlier times to demonstrate against their employers. It was hot and swarming with people when Mary Ann and Harding arrived. Some of them were “mutilés,” ex-soldiers who had lost arms and legs 30 years ago in that war against the Germans.

  “Don’t step on that foot,” Mary Ann heard one of them say, “it’s the only one I’ve got.” Harding called them “The Legion of the One-Legged.”

  Louise met them at the door and kissed Mary Ann on both cheeks, which surprised her because it was the first time they had met. Louise was tall, ramrod-straight and, even at 50, still a beautiful woman. She took them to the front row and motioned Mary Ann to sit next to her. She saw Alain come in, surrounded by workers in blue cloth caps, calling many by their first names. He was friendly and modest, with nothing to prove. He nodded to Mary Ann as if to say that he would see her later.

  The meeting opened with the singing of “The Internationale,” the workers’ anthem. Surviving members of the Paris Commune, who had revolted against the government in 1871, were introduced. Then Alain got up to speak.

  “Many of us already know each other,” he started. “And I hope by the end of the evening you will all know me better, and I will know many more of you. I am Alain Chevrier, a contestant for the Meurthe Prize. One million francs. I will win the Prize. But I won’t take the money. I renounce the money, which was stolen from people like you.

  When I win the Prize, I will give it back to the people to whom it belongs. I will reclaim the workers’ tools from the pawnshops. I will free the musicians’ instruments. Then I will take what is left and go up over The Zone, that region of poverty outside our city walls, and let it fly in handfuls. And that is my answer to Meurthe and all the others who think they can buy men with money!”

  There were shouts and the stamping of feet as reporters headed for the door. They could see the headlines now: “Chevrier Renounces Prize.”

  “Please light the magic lantern,” said Alain. He was standing with his back to a whitewashed wall.

  “Tonight I want to talk of a great philosopher named Aristotle. Aristotle never took flight, as I have, and as your children will, but he had some remarkable theories.