PROLOGUE

Paris, October 7, 1870

LÉON GAMBETTA HAD ONE WORKING EYE. THE OTHER HE had lost as a child when a laborer’s tool broke as he was passing by and metal fragments flew into his face. The damaged eye was later replaced by a glass sphere. Cosmetically, this artificial eye was a success, but monocular vision made it hard for Gambetta to judge distances. He had begun his career as a lawyer but was now a famous politician, and when photographers, painters, and illustrators made portraits of him, they tended to show him in profile.

One of those portraits was taken by Nadar, the pioneering photographer, cartoonist, and balloonist and one of the nineteenth century’s great self-promoters. Gaspard-Félix Tournachon was his real name. (He had a joking habit of adding the syllable dar to the ends of words, so his friends turned Tournachon into Tourna-dar, which was in turn shortened to Nadar.) He had a square, heavy head and dark, darting eyes. He was myopic. His doughy face was punctuated by a small mole in the center of his left cheek and another, larger one above his right cheekbone. It became almost fantastically expressive when he was impassioned.

That was often. Nadar did everything with maximum urgency, total conviction. And he had giant, history-shaping plans for Gambetta. On the morning of October 7, 1870, he was going to realize them. But before he did, he had to pay a visit to the writer Victor Hugo, another lion of public life whose photograph he had taken. Hugo had only recently returned to Paris from the island of Guernsey in the English Channel. An unforeseen change in government and a moment of national peril had prompted his sudden return after two decades in exile. His mere presence in the French capital lent its citizens a heightened sense of valor and purpose.

Hugo and Nadar went back years together. When, five years earlier, Nadar wrote The Right to Flight—a polemic on behalf of ballooning—he had sent the manuscript to Hugo in Guernsey. Designing his magnanimous reply for wide consumption, Hugo praised Nadar’s courage, comparing him not only to Christopher Columbus but to Voltaire. Looking to the future, he predicted that human flight would achieve a “magnificent transfiguration” and even a “colossal pacifist revolution.”

Now, however, just five years later, Paris was under martial law. The city was besieged. And Gambetta’s balloon flight was the first, desperate step in a critical mission—preserving France from humiliation.

NADAR HAD SPENT the last few weeks camped in a bell tent at the Place Saint-Pierre on the Butte Montmartre. From here, over chimneys and rooftops, you could see the immensity of Paris spreading grayly to the south. Hugo, who was staying just down the hill at the home of his friend Paul Meurice on the curving, sloping Avenue Frochot, greeted the photographer that crisp October morning with his usual engulfing affability. Nadar reciprocated, asking the great writer if he had any mail he wanted sent out of the city and making sure to mention that bundles of the writer’s pamphlets were at that very moment being loaded into two balloons being prepared for launch. If Hugo was curious, he added, he should come up and watch. Nadar’s plan had been for the balloons to launch the previous day, but the sky had been cloudy and it was difficult to tell which way the air currents were moving. Nothing was ideal, frankly—the balloons were certainly not what they should be—but at least the winds seemed more promising now.

The writer thanked Nadar profusely, and the two men bade each other farewell. At around ten o’clock, Hugo, sixty-eight, with shortish hair and a full bushy beard, his feral eyes pinched and glassy with late-life intent, made his way up the hill and soon found himself on the wide-open Place Saint-Pierre, his white hair mussed by a gusting wind. Hugo had unusually keen eyesight. He was renowned for his ability to make out tiny details at great distances. The legendary author and poet was a cultural figure “so vast,” as the author Lucy Sante has written, “that no lens can frame him.” He wanted to be remembered not just as one of the architects of French Romanticism but as his nation’s moral conscience. But by the 1860s, many in the younger generation of writers and artists regarded Hugo skeptically. Among them were the novelist Émile Zola and his friend, the painter Édouard Manet. In their eyes, the great man was always on the cusp, as Sante put it, of becoming “a grandiloquent hack, a sagging balloon leaking the tepid air of dated pomposity.” On the other hand, they admired not just his extraordinary literary achievements but his staunch republicanism and his brave opposition to authoritarianism. He had refused, on principle, an offer to return to France if he agreed to refrain from criticizing Napoleon III. To the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire, Hugo was “great, terrible, as immense as a mythic being, Cyclopean.” In the eyes of many of his fellow Parisians, he was all but untouchable.

When he wasn’t writing, Hugo liked to draw and paint. He worked on his pictures in private, but he hung his favorite pieces on the walls of his home and gave some to his friends. Still, when critics who knew him urged him to exhibit his work, he resisted, not wanting anything to get in the way of his reputation as a writer. Making art was, for him, a private, peripheral activity. He worked quickly, using anything that was to hand: not just ink but powdered charcoal, crushed grease paint, black coffee, and sprays of water. He would apply marks with his fingers, matchsticks, stencils, crumpled cloth, or lace. Romantic to the core, he had a penchant for dreamlike, Gothic imagery, inspired in part by an interest in the occult. There were shades of Francisco Goya’s later Black paintings in his work, which anticipated the later imaginings of Odilon Redon and the Surrealists. Hugo’s most productive period as an artist had been in the years after the European revolutions of 1848 and before his exile to the Channel Isles in 1851. One moody ink drawing, from 1850, was a view from above of a boundless expanse—a sort of imaginary, deserted cityscape—into the middle of which he inserted a looming tower. Another view, this one of Paris, could almost have been made on the Butte Montmartre, where Hugo now stood: it showed, from an elevated perspective, a vanishing jumble of houses framed, in the middle distance, by two vast buildings in shadow. In the foreground, fitfully illuminated by a thwarted sun, are fences, fortifications, and a forking road. A moody, impressionistic fantasy, it evoked what the historian Henri Focillon later called the “debris of civilization.”

The wind mussing Hugo’s hair now, as he again looked out over Paris, seemed promising. The scene was neither imaginary nor amorphous. It was concrete and tangible. At the center of the square, which was really a flat area of dusty wasteground, two enormous balloons drew everyone’s gaze. They resembled upside-down bottle vases cradled by taut rigging. One was off-white. Opalescent light skittered off it. The other, its underside in shadow under the blue sky, was a dirty yellow, like the tarnished whites of Hugo’s eyes. Through a scattered crowd of soldiers and civilians, Hugo saw one-eyed Gambetta, crouching on the pavement, pulling on fur-lined boots. Surveying the scene, the writer felt a lightness around the heart, an almost coltish excitement. What he was about to watch would go down in history—he could smell it. It would mark the beginning of the embattled new French republic’s deliverance from peril—a Genesis story to match the midnight ride of Paul Revere in the American colonists’ War of Independence, almost a century earlier; an unlikely vindication; a victory against the odds.

As the minutes elapsed, his mind conjured with words, sentences, poetry. He watched Gambetta, who was less than half his age, get to his feet. His dark, unkempt hair flowed back from his brow in turbulent waves. At thirty-two, the proud republican, of Genoese-Jewish descent, was showing early signs of corpulence. In intimate settings, he was very congenial; the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir would later call Gambetta “the simplest and most courteous man I ever met.” At rest, his face had a wide-open, almost somnolent look. But at a podium, righteously aroused, he was dynamic, indignant, unforgettable.

Before all this recent upheaval, he had been a regular at the Café de Londres, near the Place Vendôme and the Madeleine, where he occasionally met up with Manet, a fellow staunch republican and another friend of Nadar. (On one of his early Spanish-themed paintings, Manet had scrawled “to my friend Nadar” above his signature.) In his early days at the bar, Gambetta had been employed by Manet’s cousin Jules de Jouy, and he used to meet up with Manet’s brother Gustave, whom he also knew through the law, at the Café Procope on the Left Bank, once a haunt of the Jacobins.

Gambetta found Édouard Manet to be delightful company. “Few men,” claimed Manet’s friend from childhood, Antonin Proust, “have ever been so captivating.” The painter’s eyes had a squinting, amused expression, and his cheeks were covered by a soft blond beard. They said he was one of the few men left who knew how to talk to women. But Manet was also one of France’s most notorious artists. For almost a decade, he had been exhibiting his bold, bizarre-looking paintings at the annual Salon, courting controversy, creating friction with government authorities, and gradually—by his mercurial personal influence as much as by his audacity on canvas—seeding a new school of artists. Hugo had certainly heard of him, just as he had heard much about Gambetta from his dearest friend, Paul Meurice. Gambetta and Manet had both frequented Meurice’s home on the Avenue Frochot, where Manet had also attended the salon of Meurice’s notorious neighbor, the courtesan and artists’ model Apollonie Sabatier. Sabatier had been the muse and lover of Manet’s close friend Baudelaire from 1857 to 1862. Among those invited to her salon were Hugo, the writers Gustave Flaubert and Edmond de Goncourt (who nicknamed her “La Présidente”), the composer Hector Berlioz, the painter Ernest Meissonier, and the sculptor Auguste Clésinger, whose sculpture of a naked Sabatier writhing in ecstasy—or from the pain of a snakebite—had been carved after a plaster cast taken directly from her body.

Gambetta wore an arctic overcoat. He held a fur cap in one hand, and a leather bag was slung over his shoulder. As Hugo looked on, he strode toward the dirty yellow balloon, which had been named the Armand Barbès after an ardent republican, a hero of the revolution of 1848, who had died earlier that year. (After an insurrection in 1839, Armand Barbès had been sentenced to death, but thanks to an intervention by Hugo, his sentence was commuted.) Gambetta squeezed through the rigging and into the basket. Alongside him, already aboard, were his secretary, Jacques-Eugène Spuller, and the balloon’s pilot, a young man named Trichet, who now took Gambetta’s bag and tied it to the rigging. The basket itself was cramped. At their feet was a 220-pound packet of mail. Suspended from a ring above the basket was a cage holding sixteen clucking and bobbling pigeons. A pigeon fancier approached the balloon to give the crew last-minute instructions: when to feed the birds, how to roll letters around their tail feathers. He stepped back, his counsel delivered, and now Gambetta leaned out to acknowledge the crowd who had come to see him off. They filled the square. Those hoping for better views formed loose lines that crisscrossed the steep, bare hill behind it up to the Solferino Tower.

Nadar stood back beside a nearby lamppost. Behind him were the bell tents in which he and his team had been sleeping these past few weeks. He was accustomed to spectacles. His life’s purpose, in fact, was to generate them—and he liked being the center of attention. But he looked anxious. He, more than anyone, was responsible for what was about to happen. Nadar wasn’t just a pioneer of ballooning; he had also been at the forefront of exploiting the commercial potential of photography, a medium still in its infancy. Twelve years earlier, combining his passions, he had risen in a tethered balloon 260 feet above a village on the outskirts of Paris to take the world’s first-ever aerial photograph. This show, this spectacle, felt different. It was about something bigger than ballooning, or photography, or his own renown. Nadar held the fate of France in his hands. And he worried it would end badly.

The second balloon—the white one—had been named the George Sand, after the writer—also a republican—who was as famous as Hugo and had in fact written a preface to The Right to Flight. (If nothing else, Nadar knew how to get his story out.) The George Sand carried two Americans, William Reynolds and George May. Both were employees of the firearms dealer Schuyler, Hartley, and Graham, a firm that had just brokered a one-million-franc deal to supply arms to the fledgling French government. Reynolds and May were glad to have closed the deal; they were less pleased to have to rely on one of Nadar’s battered old balloons to get them out of Paris.

Earlier that morning, after his visit to Hugo, Nadar had made a trial ascent in a tethered balloon, hoping to get a better sense of the wind. It was gusting, but by and large he thought the conditions favorable. Much depended on getting Gambetta, the Americans, and their bundle of mail out of Paris. Now was the time to act. He checked again on the readiness of the pilots and their passengers—all seemed in order—then gave the signal. A team of sailors untied the anchor ropes. Slowly, fitfully, the balloons began to rise. Still clinging to the ropes, the sailors tried to guide and steady the craft as they ascended. It was important that their trajectory be as close to vertical as possible. If they drifted too quickly to one side, they could collide with the Montmartre rooftops. Now in the fluky wind, the Armand Barbès began to swing like a jerky pendulum. Gambetta gripped the side of the basket as it swung. The spectators shouted “Vive la République!” and “Vive Gambetta!” Steadying himself, Gambetta extended one arm in a kind of salute. Seconds later both balloons were in the clear, Trichet cried “Lachez tout!” and the moorings were cast off.

The balloons rose beautifully for several minutes. But then the wind shifted and began to take them northward—toward a danger graver than rooftops. As the Armand Barbès rose and gently rotated in the brisk fall air, Gambetta twisted his body and swiveled his head to take it all in. The sight that met his monocular vision was mesmerizing; it was like nothing he had ever seen. It was Paris, but from a wholly fresh perspective. Its massy architectural landmarks, the thrusting new boulevards, the grand elevations and intimate sight lines—all of it reduced to a strange flat, not quite legible pattern. All those intimate textures of tree branch, gable, and attic window had been ironed out, rendered tiny and trivial. Gambetta was “stupefied,” he said later, “at the total obliteration of the picturesque in the boundless expanse beneath.”

As his eye roved in the slowly spinning basket, he could make out the Seine and Notre-Dame on Île de la Cité and then the adjacent Île Saint-Louis. He could see the long lines of Baron Haussmann’s boulevards like bold, slashing stripes. Somewhere down there was the Café de Londres. He could see the Bois de Boulogne like a shaved scalp, its massy trees lately cut down for firewood, its pastures dotted with animals that, to Gambetta’s eye, appeared like colonies of drugged insects. He could see, too, the lines of fortification defining Paris’s perimeter and, beyond the suburban belt, a conspicuous ring of forts. Beyond the forts was unoccupied land, wooded in places and open in others. And beyond that—all the way around, in a line implied by the mind where it was not strictly visible—the entrenched lines of an enemy army.

Many of the soldiers in this army—they were German speakers—were looking up at Gambetta as he drifted over them in his patched-together balloon. They had guns—surely a grave concern for anyone floating in a calico balloon filled with coal gas. Their commanders, Otto von Bismarck and his unflinching chief of staff, Helmuth von Moltke, had issued orders to shoot the balloons down.