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Updated: May 27, 2025
One or two are conspicuous, though all are beautiful. Souvenirs d'un ami has pale flesh-coloured flowers, exceedingly delicate; nor is the perfume they emit less attractive. Niphetus, pure white; Adam, very pale; and Géant des Batailles, of the richest crimson, are among the most attractive; but there are numerous others, rivalling them in beauty and fragrance.
The object in view when this formidable monster was designed and constructed was to create the means to collect sufficient funds to form a "Free Association for Aerial Navigation by means of MACHINES HEAVIER THAN AIR," and for the construction of machines on this principle. The receipts from the exhibition of the "Geant" were intended to form the first capital of the association.
Thus in Walton's "Angler," you have a meeting of two friends, one a Derbyshire man, the other a lowland traveler, who is as much alarmed, and uses nearly as many expressions of astonishment, at having to go down a steep hill and ford a brook, as a traveler uses now at crossing the glacier of the Col du Géant.
As I stopped to look at a Géant de Bataille, which had three splendid blooms, I distinctly saw the stalk of one of the roses bend, close to me, as if an invisible hand had bent it, and then break, as if that hand had picked it!
To employ an expression of M. Nadar's it seems that these gentlemen never before experienced such a "knock-down blow." After all these preparations, all this trouble, all the energy employed in the undertaking sufficient, indeed, wherewith to attempt to cross the Atlantic to "descend at Meaux!" The 'Geant, however, had its revenge. Its second ascent gave it this revenge.
The atmosphere was still quite clear round the 'Geant, although there was a thick haze underneath, through which we could occasionally see lights glimmering from the earth. We had attained a sufficient altitude to be only just able to hear noises from villages that we left beneath us, and were beginning to enjoy the delicious calm and repose peculiar to aerial ascents.
It is astonishing how disappointed I felt. I thought it would have been so pleasant to have looked out upon a garden planted with flowers and trees, so amusing to have watched the demoiselles at their play; to have studied female character in a variety of phases, myself the while sheltered from view by a modest muslin curtain, whereas, owing doubtless to the absurd scruples of some old duenna of a directress, I had now only the option of looking at a bare gravelled court, with an enormous "pas de geant" in the middle, and the monotonous walls and windows of a boys' school-house round.
It was another party of aeronauts in a smaller balloon, who left at the same time as we did, and who would persist in keeping the 'Geant' company. We are passing over a small town; we hear the usual shouting and the report of a gun. Our first thoughts are Was it loaded with shot or ball?
He had seen a man waving a signal of distress on the slopes of Mont Blanc above the great buttress. And this is how the signal came to be waved. An hour before Chayne and Sylvia set out from Chamonix to cross the Col du Géant, and while it was yet quite dark, a spark glowed suddenly on an island of rocks set in the great white waste of the Brenva glacier.
A large section of the public laboured under the delusion that Nadar's balloon was one capable of being steered. In reality, however, the 'Geant' was unquestionably the most rebellious and unruly specimen of its class that has been made since the days of Montgolfier.
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