[A Wedding Tour in a Balloon]
By M. Dinorben Griffith and Madame Camille Flammarion.
Once or twice one has come across a story of some adventurous couple (usually in America) who have been married in a captive balloon. The incident is reproduced from time to time, the newspapers printing it almost always placing on some other newspaper the responsibility of the statement. The story may originally have taken its birth in a diseased craving of some undistinguished couple for notoriety, or, as is more likely, in a lack of striking headlines for some very enterprising American paper. But in any case, we are concerned here with no such matter, but with an actual wedding trip, undertaken and carried through by a very distinguished couple, in a perfectly free balloon; and this with no idea of notoriety-hunting.
The name of M. Camille Flammarion, the distinguished French astronomer, is very nearly as familiar in this country as in France, and some of his most important works are made popular by means of translations. He is distinguished by an imagination very rare in men of science, and his theories of the inhabitation of the stars are of a very striking and beautiful character; while many other of his astronomical speculations are similarly bold and original.
M. Flammarion's interest in ballooning began more than thirty years ago, and since that time he has been a most enthusiastic aeronaut; making very numerous ascents and recording large numbers of extremely important scientific observations. His book, "Voyages en Ballon," contains many interesting accounts of his ascents, and has been translated by Mr. James Glaisher, the English meteorologist and aeronaut. It is of the wedding trip performed in a balloon by Monsieur and Madame Flammarion that we are to speak.
Madame Flammarion is herself a most enthusiastic balloon-traveller. Indeed, she has often said that nothing but the practical impossibility of the feat prevents her living altogether in a balloon. And she takes much delight in recounting the story of her wedding trip, which was her first balloon ascent, and of a humorous incident which characterized it. We shall give Madame Flammarion's account as nearly as her own words can be rendered in English. The story was told us in the beautiful garden of the Château Juvisy, the magnificent house which is now M. Flammarion's home and observatory, but which has been the resting-place of French Kings in their journeys between Paris and Fontainebleau, from Henri Quatre to Louis Philippe. Parenthetically we may say that Madame Flammarion is herself a distinguished person, and Vice-President of the League of Ladies on behalf of International Disarmament. This is her story as she tells it:—
I had always wished to make a balloon ascent. The stories and descriptions I had read had touched my enthusiasm, and already, before I had entered a balloon, I was, at heart, an enthusiastic aeronaut. To hang in space above, looking down upon the rolling world below, and all the little people in it, was for years the height of all my ambitions. Nevertheless, I never expected to make an ascent in circumstances so novel and charming as those which actually accompanied my first balloon experience.