Combat
One day his father felt doubts about the capacity of such a young man to resist the intoxication of so much flattery from men and women.
"Don't worry," Guynemer answered, "I am watching my nerves as an acrobat watches his muscles. I have chosen my own mission, and I must fulfil it."
After his death, one of his friends, the one who spoke to him last, told me: "He used to put aside heaps of flattering letters which he did not even read. 'Read them if you like,' he said to me, and I destroyed them. He only read letters from children, schoolboys and soldiers."
In L'Aiglon Prokesch brings the mail to the Prince Imperial, and handing him letters from women, he says:
Voilà
Ce que c'est d'avoir l'auréole fatale.
As soon as Prokesch begins to read them, the Prince stops him with the words: "Je déchire." Even when a woman whom he has nicknamed "Little Spring"—"because the water sleeping in her eyes or purling in her voice has often cooled his fever"—announces her departure, hoping he may detain her, he lets her go, whispering again like a refrain, "Je déchire."
Did Guynemer deal with hearts as he dealt with the besieging letters, or as the falcon of St. Jean l'Hospitalier dealt with birds?—No "Little Spring," had her voice been ever so rill-like, could have detained him when a sunny morning invited him skywards.
Safe from the admiring public, Guynemer would relax and breathe freely with his people at Compiègne, where he became once more a lively, noisy, indulged, but coaxing and charming boy, except when absorbed in work, from which nothing could distract him. He spent hours in pasting and classifying the snapshots he took of his enemies just before pulling the trigger of his machine-gun and bringing them down. One of his greatest pleasures when on leave was to arrange and show these photographs.