Never had it been more important that Wilbur perform to perfection, for any mishap now, coming after Orville’s crash, would be seen in a very different light, and so, as much as he was enjoying himself, the pressure on him was greater than ever. Only by escaping out into the countryside on his bicycle could he have time to himself. “How I long for Kitty Hawk!” he wrote to Octave Chanute.
In his honor the Aéro-Club de France was planning its biggest banquet ever at which Wilbur was to receive the club’s Gold Medal and a prize of 5,000 francs ($1,000) and in addition a gold medal from the Académie des Sports. “I will have quite a collection of bric-a-brac by the time I return home,” he wrote to brother Reuchlin. What he valued still more, he said, was the friendship of so many of the good people of Le Mans.
When he had arrived a few months earlier he had known no one. Now he counted some of his warmest friends among those he had come to know. It seemed all the children within a dozen-mile radius would greet him as he rode by on his bicycle. They would politely take off their caps and smile and say, “Bonjour! Monsieur Wright.”
“They are really almost the only ones except close friends who know how to pronounce my name,” he told Reuchlin. “People in general pronounce my name, ‘Vreecht’ with a terrible rattle of the ‘r.’ In many places I am called by my first name, ‘Veelbare’ almost entirely.”
The Aéro-Club de France’s banquet took place in Paris the evening of November 5, 1908, in the salle de théâtre of the Automobile Club on the Place de la Concorde. As reported, the “brilliantly illuminated” room had been “transformed” by plants and flowers “in profusion.” The 250 guests, nearly all men in full dress, included almost every major figure in French aviation—Léon Delagrange, Louis Blériot, Alberto Santos-Dumont, Ernest Archdeacon—in addition to Léon Bollée, Hart Berg, and Comte Charles de Lambert. Conspicuous, too, was the great structural engineer Gustave Eiffel. Among the few women present was Edith Berg.
A military band provided appropriately rousing music and, as the guests read in the menus at each of their places, the evening’s sumptuous feast included jambon d’York aux épinards (ham with spinach), faisan rôti aux croutons (roasted pheasant with croutons), salade Russe (Russian potato salad), and Glace a lananas (pineapple ice cream).
All was quite befitting the occasion—as a statement of national pride and the elegant taste of the time, and as recognition of an infinitely promising turning point in history.
In presenting the Gold Medal, the president of the Aéro-Club, M. L. P. Cailletet, spoke of the great change in public opinion that had swept over France and the world in general since Wilbur Wright began his performance at Le Mans. He spoke of how Wilbur and his brother had endured a period of ridicule and abuse such as had seldom been known in the history of scientific investigation. France, he said, was now at last showing its appreciation of their merit.
Wilbur received a sustained ovation, and Louis Barthou, minister of public works, delivered a “hearty speech of congratulation,” lauding Wilbur and Orville for achieving “through straightforwardness, intelligence, and tenacity . . . one of the most beautiful inventions of the human genius.
Mr. Wright is a man who has never been discouraged even in the face of hesitation and suspicion. The brothers Wright have written their names in human history as inventors of pronounced genius.
Photographs were taken. Then Wilbur rose from his place at the center of the head table. Baron d’Estournelles de Constant translated as Wilbur spoke.
For myself and my brother I thank you for the honor you are doing us and for the cordial reception you have tendered us this evening.
If I had been born in your beautiful country and had grown up among you, I could not have expected a warmer welcome than has just been given me. When we did not know each other, we had no confidence in each other; today, when we are acquainted, it is otherwise: we believe each other, and we are friends. I thank you for this. In the enthusiasm being shown around me, I see not merely an outburst intended to glorify a person, but a tribute to an idea that has always impassioned mankind. I sometimes think that the desire to fly after the fashion of birds is an ideal handed down to us by our ancestors who, in their grueling travels across trackless lands in prehistoric times, looked enviously on the birds soaring freely through space, at full speed, above all obstacles, on the infinite highway of the air. Scarcely ten years ago, all hope of flying had almost been abandoned; even the most convinced had become doubtful, and I confess that, in 1901, I said to my brother Orville that men would not fly for fifty years. Two years later, we ourselves were making flights. This demonstration of my inability as a prophet gave me such a shock that I have ever since distrusted myself and have refrained from all prediction—as my friends of the press, especially, well know. But it is not really necessary to look too far into the future; we see enough already to be certain that it will be magnificent. Only let us hurry and open the roads.
Once again, I thank you with all my heart, and in thanking you I should like it understood that I am thanking all of France.
At the point when Wilbur expressed his gratitude for the warm friendship he had experienced in a country not his own, his “habitually rigid mask softened,” according to one account, “his voice, usually so clear, quavered slightly.”
The members and guests responded with a standing ovation. The band played “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and for some time afterward Wilbur stood patiently signing two hundred or more menus. “He knows the little chores that are incumbent upon our heroes to perform,” observed the account in L’Aérophile approvingly.
In the weeks that followed, Wilbur returned several times to Paris to receive additional tributes and awards and to be hosted at more dinners in his honor. When not being celebrated at such gatherings, he could be seen striding alone up and down the Bois de Boulogne or exploring the avenues, looking in the windows of curio shops or standing quietly studying the architecture of one of the city’s monuments.
“He has a half dozen invitations for every day,” wrote a correspondent for the New York World, “and some few of them he accepts, putting on his hat and coat to go out and meet ladies and gentlemen who have spent an hour or two with their maids and valets in order to make themselves sufficiently beautiful for the honor of meeting him.