The largest of the competitive events, an international flying meet, was scheduled for the coming summer, at the town of Reims, northeast of Paris in the champagne country.
III.
With his demonstrations concluded at Pau, Wilbur spent his final few days there packing the new Flyer for shipment in sections to Rome—the Flyer used at Le Mans and Pau would ultimately wind up in a museum in Paris—and supervising the final stages of training for his French students to the point where all three had soloed. Orville and Katharine had already returned to Paris, and on March 23, Wilbur, too, left Pau for Paris.
A few days later the three Wrights went to Le Mans to be received at a heartwarming farewell banquet. Three days after that Wilbur and Hart Berg were on board a train from Paris to Rome, where, a week later, Orville and Katharine were to join them.
In Paris, to Katharine’s delight, the social pace continued full speed. As she informed her father, she was the only woman ever invited to a dinner at the Aéro-Club de France. “You ought to seen it,” she wrote in the Ohio vernacular. “Me—sitting up there big as you . . . talking French as lively as anyone! It was a performance I can tell you.” Best of all, she also told the Bishop, he had been toasted. “They drank a champagne in your honor!”
Katharine and Orville left for Rome on April 9 and arrived the next afternoon to find the city overrun with tourists, including an estimated thirty thousand Americans. Apparently no one had prepared them for such crowds. Hotels, restaurants, monuments, and museums were swarming with people. Hart Berg had found rooms for Orville and Katharine opposite the Barberini Palace. Wilbur was staying several miles south of the city at a flying field called Centocelle, but instead of a shed this time he was living in a nearby cottage on an estate belonging to a countess.
In terms of the purpose for which the Wrights had come there, Rome was an unqualified success. From April 15 to the 26, Wilbur completed more than fifty flights, all to great acclaim and without mishap. He trained Italian military officers how to fly his plane, lectured to schoolteachers and students, and took a variety of passengers for a ride, one of whom, a news cameraman, produced the first motion picture films ever shot from an airplane in flight.
The weather was ideal and as in France, large crowds watched in amazement. And again there was no shortage of prominent figures among the onlookers. King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy strolled about with a camera slung over his shoulder as though one of the tourists. There were princes, dukes, cabinet members, the American financier J. P. Morgan and his sister and daughter, and James J. Hill, the famous American railroad builder. The American ambassador to Italy, Lloyd Griscom, was one of those who went flying with Wilbur.
But for Orville and Katharine, Rome, after the time they had had in France, left much to be desired. That April was “the choice season” in Rome, that the palaces of the Caesars, the Arch of Constantine, and the Colosseum were even more impressive than expected, was not sufficient. As Katharine told her father, “I was homesick for the first time when we reached Rome.” She and Orville both were “very anxious to come home.” She found their hotel appallingly dirty. “We would appreciate a good clean bathtub and clean plates and knives and forks much more than the attention we receive.” In another letter she reported, “The waiters at the table are so dirty that I can hardly eat a mouthful of food.”
She and Orville thought J. P. Morgan, his sister and daughter, “pleasant” enough, but were growing weary of the ways of the aristocracy. When word came that Victor Emmanuel would be arriving at Centocelle Field at eight in the morning to see Wilbur fly, it only went to prove that kings could be a nuisance. “They always come at such unearthly hours,” wrote Katharine.
A lunch in honor of the three Wrights at the beautiful villa of the Contessa Celleri, who was providing Wilbur’s living quarters, was all quite fine, as was the drive provided for their enjoyment into the countryside in a brand-new, elegant automobile, until the chauffeur, taking a curve at breakneck speed, smashed head-on into a stone wall. Fortunately no one was hurt, though the car was a total wreck.
Brother Wilbur was quite well, Katharine was pleased to report to the Bishop. Orville, too, was looking well and “improves all the time, but—like me—doesn’t care much for the discomforts of Rome.” They would be heading to London by way of Paris, then on to New York as soon as possible.
After two days in London, where they were feted and honored still further—a banquet at the Ritz Hotel, the first ever Gold Medal awarded by the British Aeronautical Society—the three sailed on May 5 from Southampton on the German ocean liner Kronprinzessin Cecilie.
For Wilbur it was the end of just over a year in Europe, much the greater part of which had been spent in France. It was there, in France, beginning at Le Mans, that he had flown as no man ever had anywhere on earth. At Le Mans and Pau he had flown far more than anyone ever had and set every record for distance, speed, altitude, time in the air, and made the first flights ever with a passenger, and all this, after so many years of the near secrecy of his and Orville’s efforts, had been done for all to see. The whole world now knew.
The threesome had also become far richer financially. The time in Europe had resulted in an accumulated compensation from contracts and prizes of some $200,000.
Wilbur had also found among the French a wealth of friendship such as he had never known. As he would write much later in a letter of gratitude to Léon Bollée, “We do not forget that you expended much time and gave yourself much trouble in order to be of assistance to us and that you rejoiced with us in our successes and grieved with us in our troubles.” These were not things to compensate for with money, “but we cherish them forever in our hearts.”
For Orville the four-month-long Grand Tour had provided a greatly needed change of scene and the chance to recuperate at his own pace. For Katharine it was a colossal reward for all she had done for her brothers for so long in so many ways.
Further, as would become increasingly clear later, they had seen Europe at an almost perfect time, when prosperity and peace prevailed, when Americans in abundance were discovering and enjoying the experience of European travel and the changes in outlook it brought as never before, and when the horrors of modern, mechanized warfare were still to come. Travelers from all parts of America who were there then would never forget the time. Nor would the three Wrights. Nor were they ever again to enjoy such a time together.