were not free from nervousness, writes:

"Our departure was at fifty-four minutes past one, and occasioned
little stir among the spectators. Thinking they might be frightened
and stand in need of encouragement I waved my arm."

This solicitude for the fears of the spectators, standing safely on
solid earth while the first aeronauts sailed skywards, is
characteristically Gallic. The Marquis continues:

M. de Rozier cried: "You are doing nothing, and we are not
rising." I stirred the fire and then began to scan the river,
but Pilatre again cried: "See the river. We are dropping into
it!" We again urged the fire, but still clung to the river bed.
Presently I heard a noise in the upper part of the balloon,
which gave a shock as though it had burst. I called to my
companion: "Are you dancing?" The balloon by this time had many
holes burnt in it and using my sponge I cried that we must
descend. My companion however explained that we were over Paris
and must now cross it; therefore raising the fire once more we
turned south till we passed the Luxembourg, when,
extinguishing the flames, the balloon came down spent and
empty.

If poor Pilatre played the part of a rather nervous man in this
narrative he had the nerve still to go on with his aeronautical
experiments to the point of death. In 1785 he essayed the crossing
of the English Channel in a balloon of his own design, in which he
sought to combine the principles of the gas and hot-air balloons. It
appears to have been something like an effort to combine
nitro-glycerine with an electric spark. At any rate the dense crowds
that thronged the coast near Boulogne to see the start of the
"Charles--Montgolfier"--as the balloon was named after the
originators of the rival systems--saw it, after half an hour's drift
out to sea, suddenly explode in a burst of flame. De Rozier and a
friend who accompanied him were killed. A monument still recalls
their fate, which however is more picturesquely recorded in the
signs of sundry inns and cafes of the neighbourhood which offer
refreshment in the name of _Les Aviateurs Perdus_.

Thereafter experimenters with balloons multiplied amazingly. The
world thought the solution of the problem of flight had been found
in the gas bag. Within two months a balloon capable of lifting
eighteen tons and carrying seven passengers ascended three thousand
feet at Lyons, and, though sustai