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Updated: October 24, 2025
Seven hours later Roziers, accompanied by his brother Romain, one of the constructors of the balloon, appeared in the gallery. A nobleman present threw a purse of 200 louis into the car, and was preparing to follow it and join in the adventure. Roziers forbade him to enter, gently but firmly. "The experiment is too unsafe," he said, "for me to expose to danger the life of another."
She who was dearest to him a young English lady, who boarded at a convent at Boulogne, and whom he had first met only a few days prior to his last ascent could not support the news of his death. Horrible convulsions seized her and she expired, it is said, eight days after the dreadful catastrophe. Roziers died at the age of twenty-eight and a half years."
The longest course travelled by Montgolfiere balloons, and the highest elevation reached by them, were achieved by Roziers and Proust with the Montgolfiere la Marie Antoinette, at Versailles, on the 23rd of June, 1784. Roziers himself has left us a picturesque narrative of this excursion from Versailles to Compiegne. He says:
The machine remained six minutes at this elevation without any fire in the grating. Second Ascent: The machine carried Roziers and the counterbalancing weight fire being in the grating to the height of 700 feet.
"I was surprised at the silence and the absence of movement which our departure caused among the spectators, and believed them to be astonished and perhaps awed at the strange spectacle; they might well have reassured themselves I was still gazing, when M. Roziers cried to me "'You are doing nothing, and the balloon is scarcely rising a fathom.
After the balloon was at last inflated, Prince Charles and the Comes de Laurencin, Dampierre, and Laporte threw themselves into the gallery. They were all armed, and were determined not to quit their places to whoever might come. Roziers, who wished at the last to enjoy a high ascent, proposed to reduce the number to three, and to draw lots for the purpose. But the gentlemen would not descend.
Roziers dispatched the Marquis d'Arlandes, who had been up with him, to the king. Arlandes asserted that there was no danger, and, as proof of his conviction, he offered himself to accompany Roziers. Solicited on all sides, Louis at last yielded. The gardens of La Muette, near Paris, were fixed upon as the spot from which this aerial expedition should start.
So much had been accomplished when Roziers made his first aerial voyage above the astonished capital of France that all the rest seemed easy.
This machine was destined to suffer from endless misfortunes. It took fire while being inflated, and, several days afterwards, it was damaged by snow and rain. Put nothing discouraged Roziers and his companions. Places had been arranged in the gallery for six persons.
In vain did Roziers' friends attempt to make him understand the perils to which this enterprise must expose him; his only reply was that he had discovered a new balloon which united in itself all the necessary conditions of security, and would permit the voyager to remain an unusually long time in the air.
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