Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air. Richard Holmes

time, Garnerin’s niece Lisa. Both seemed to vie for official recognition, though Lisa suffered from the waning popularity of the Garnerin name with Napoleon.

      Sophie Blanchard seems to have caught the Emperor’s attention during a midsummer ascent from the Champ de Mars in Paris on 24 June 1810. Soon after, she was asked to contribute to the celebration mounted by the Imperial Guard for Napoleon’s marriage to the Archduchess Marie-Louise of Austria. From then on she became a fixture at the imperial court, with propaganda as well as entertainment duties. On the birth of Napoleon’s son in March 1811, she took a balloon flight over Paris from the Champ de Mars and threw out leaflets proclaiming the happy event. She again performed at the official celebration of his baptism at the Château de Saint-Cloud on 23 June, with a spectacular firework display launched from her balloon. In the same year, in an ascent above Vincennes, she climbed so high to avoid being trapped in a hailstorm that she lost consciousness, and spent 14½ hours in the air as a result.

      Napoleon now made Sophie’s position official. He appointed her Aéronaute des Fêtes Officielles, a position especially created for her, and gave her responsibility for organising ballooning displays at all major events in Paris. It was also said that he made her his ‘Chief Air Minister of Ballooning’, with secret instructions to draw up plans for an aerial invasion of England. However this seems more like English counter-propaganda, as Napoleon’s idea for an invasion of England had long since been displaced by the ultimately disastrous invasion of Russia, which began in the spring of 1812.

      Sophie had by now developed her own peculiar free-style of ballooning. She abandoned her husband’s large canopy and unwieldy basket, both of which were by this time much battered. To replace them she commissioned a much smaller silk balloon, capable of lifting her on a tiny, decorative silver gondola. This was shaped like a small canoe or child’s cradle, curved upwards at each end but otherwise quite open. It was little more than three feet long and one foot high at the sides. One end was upholstered to form a small armchair (in which she sometimes slept), but otherwise the gondola offered astonishingly little protection. When she stood up, grasping the balloon ropes, the edge of the gondola did not reach above her knees. It was virtually like standing in a flying champagne bucket.

      She also began to adopt distinctive outfits, which could be seen at a considerable distance. For this purpose her dresses were always white cotton and narrowly cut, with the fashionable English Regency style of high waist and low décolletage. Her sleeves were long, coming right down to her knuckles, presumably to keep her hands warm at high altitudes. Most important of all, she wore a series of white bonnets extravagantly plumed with coloured feathers, to increase her height and visibility. The combined effect of these dramatic clothes and the tiny silver gondola was to make her look both flamboyant and vulnerable. She also appeared terrifyingly exposed, an effect she evidently cultivated.

      Sophie now began to give displays in Italy. In the summer of 1811 she took her balloon across the Alps by coach, and celebrated Napoleon’s birthday, the Fête de l’Empereur on 15 August, with an ascent above Milan. She travelled on to Rome with instructions to efface the memory of the unfortunate incident of Nero’s tomb. Here she ascended spectacularly to a height of twelve thousand feet, and stayed aloft all night in her tiny upholstered chair, claiming that she fell into a profound sleep, before landing much refreshed at dawn at Tagliacozzo. She then flew by balloon from Rome to Naples, splitting the journey in half with a stop after sixty miles. She made a daring ascent in bad weather over the Campo Marte in Naples to accompany the review of the troops by Napoleon’s brother-in-law Joachim Murat, the King of Naples.

      In 1812, the third Aeronautical Exhibition was held at the Champ de Mars. With all eyes on Napoleon advancing towards Moscow, it was not a great success, so Sophie again crossed the Alps with her balloon to make ascents at Turin. On 26 April she flew so high, and the temperature dropped so low, that she suffered a nosebleed and icicles formed on her hands and face.

      On her return to Paris, Sophie was surprised to receive a letter on 9 June from André-Jacques Garnerin. He gracefully invited her to dinner at the Hôtel de Colennes to discuss ‘a project that might be of mutual interest’. This probably involved a proposal to make double ascents and parachute drops above the Jardin du Tivoli or the Parc Monceau with her old rival Lisa Garnerin. It is highly unlikely that Sophie would have accepted what she must have regarded as a demeaning and unsuitable proposition.¹⁶

      The defeat and subsequent exile of Napoleon seemed to pose Sophie Blanchard few problems. When the restored Bourbon king, Louis XVIII, entered Paris for his official enthronement on 4 May 1814, Sophie made a spectacular ascent from the Pont Neuf, with fireworks and Bengal lights. King Louis was so taken with her performance that he immediately dubbed her ‘Official Aeronaut of the Restoration’. Evidently Sophie had no qualms about this shift of political allegiance. Her only loyalty was to ballooning.

      Four more years of brilliant public displays followed, with Sophie established as queen of the fireworks night at the Tivoli and Luxembourg Gardens. Her small balloon lifted more and more complicated pyrotechnical rigs, with long booms carrying rockets and cascades, and suspended networks of Bengal lights, all of which she would skilfully ignite with extended systems of tapers and fuses. At the height of these displays, her small white figure and feathery hat would appear like some unearthly airborne creature or apparition, suspended several hundred feet overhead in the night sky, above a sea of flaming stars and coloured smoke.

      Towards midnight on 6 July 1819, a hot, overcast summer evening, Sophie Blanchard, aged forty-one, began one of her regular night ascents from the Jardin de Tivoli, accompanied by an orchestra in the bandstand below. At about five hundred feet, and still climbing, she began to touch off her rockets and Bengal lights, dropped little parachute bombs of fizzing gold and silver rain, and ignited a lattice of starshells suspended on wires twenty feet below her gondola. As the gasps and applause of the crowd floated up to her through the darkness, she became aware of a different quality of light burning above her head. Looking up, she saw that the hydrogen in the mouth of her balloon had caught fire. It was amazing that it had never done so before. Many of the crowd thought it was just part of the firework display, and continued to applaud.

      The flaming balloon dropped onto the roof of number 16, rue de Provence, near the present Gare Saint-Lazare. The impact largely extinguished the fire. Sophie was not severely burnt, but she was tangled in the balloon rigging. She slid down the roof and caught onto the parapet above the street. Here she hung for a moment, according to eyewitnesses, calmly calling out ‘A moi, à moi!’ Then she fell onto the stone cobbles beneath.

      There are numerous accounts of this fiery descent from the Paris sky. They appeared in all the Paris newspapers, and also in English journals like the Gentleman’s Magazine.¹⁷ One of the clearest, most poignant descriptions was written by an English tourist, John Poole, who witnessed the event from his hotel room.

       I was one of the thousands who saw (and I heard it too) the destruction of Madame Blanchard. On the evening of 6 July 1819, she ascended in a balloon from the Tivoli Garden at Paris. At a certain elevation she was to discharge some fireworks which were attached to her car. From my own windows I saw the ascent. For a few minutes the balloon was concealed by clouds. Presently it reappeared, and there was seen a momentary sheet of flame. There was a dreadful pause. In a few seconds, the poor creature, enveloped and entangled in the netting of her machine, fell with a frightful crash upon the slanting roof of a house in the Rue de Provence (not a hundred yards from where I was standing), and thence into the street, and Madame Blanchard was taken up a shattered corpse! ¹⁸

      The death of the Royal Aeronaut profoundly changed the reputation of ballooning in France. A public subscription was raised in her honour, but it was found that Sophie Blanchard had no family, and was reported to have left fifty francs in her will ‘to the eight-year-old daughter of one of her friends’ (perhaps an illegitimate child?). So the two thousand francs raised was used to erect a notable balloon monument, which still exists in the 94th Division of Père Lachaise cemetery.^fn10