Following breakfast at the hotel, they went for a long walk together, talking the whole time. They lunched at the Café Alcazar on the Champs-Elysées, after which they spent most of a sultry afternoon sitting and talking in the park along that boulevard. And by all signs they succeeded in clearing the air between them.
The following day they met with Hart Berg and Frank Cordley for what Wilbur described as “a rather warm heart-to-heart talk,” meaning it was extremely heated. They took up the matter of patents, Wilbur making it clear from the start that Flint & Company was in no way entering into a partnership with them. “We are, and intend to be, the sole owners of the patents,” he said, according to his own notes on the conversation. They talked of expenses, and of stock in the enterprise. “The point is this,” Wilbur told Berg. “We do not intend you to own twenty percent of any stock. We intend to own the stock. You are the selling agents.” And so it went back and forth, Berg making his case, Wilbur and Orville holding firm.
From all Wilbur had reported and explained to him, and from his own judgment of Berg, and from the meeting, Orville had his suspicions absolved, his mind put to rest. He was ready to proceed with Wilbur and as Wilbur directed. “Our friends F [Flint & Company] and B [Berg] are not in the bandit crew,” Orville was glad to assure Katharine.
Wilbur led Orville on a first stroll through the Louvre and to celebrate Orville’s arrival in Paris, Frank Cordley hosted an evening at the legendary and highly expensive Tour d’Argent by the Seine on the Left Bank, where a table-side preparation of duck, canard au sang, the main course, performed by the restaurant’s celebrated owner-chef, Frédéric Delair, seems to have made a far greater impression on Orville than anything he had seen at the Louvre. Delair worked in a formal tailcoat and with his flowing side whiskers and pince-nez eyeglasses, looked, as Orville would report to Katharine, more like a college professor than a chef and had a way of swinging his head as he carved up the duck into small pieces that in itself was worth the full price.
The legs, wings, etc., [Orville continued] are sent to another room where we cannot see them receiving the finishing touches; but the carcass, after most of the meat has been removed is put in a fancy press, and all the juice and marrow extracted. The meat and juices are then placed over the alcohol flame and cooked together. Mr. Frederic basting the meat the entire time. Finally the duck is served with the enclosed card and folder which gives the serial number of the duck we ate.
When, in a letter, Bishop Wright expressed dire warnings over the temptations of Paris, Wilbur wrote to assure him they would do nothing to disgrace the training they had received at home, and that all the wine he had tasted thus far would not fill a single glass. “We have been real good over here,” Orville added. “We have been in a lot of the big churches and haven’t got drunk yet.”
Their prospects in France were at a low ebb, thanks in large part to the number of government officials departing for their customary August vacations. But with interest in Germany still active, Wilbur and Berg decided to leave for Berlin, departing August 4.
On the way to Berlin, seeing a sign from the train window of the small town of Jemappes in Belgium, Wilbur began talking about the historic battle fought there in 1792, and, to Berg’s amazement, went on at length about the importance of the victory won by the army of the infant French Republic over the regular Austrian army. It was for Berg yet another example of the extraordinary reach of Wilbur’s mind. He had read about it in his youth, Wilbur explained.
A week later, when Charlie Taylor arrived, Orville had him check into a less conspicuous hotel on the rue d’Alger, around the corner from the Meurice, and register simply as C. E. Taylor of Lincoln, Nebraska. “We do not want the papers or anyone here to know that he has come over,” Orville wrote Katharine. In the time since Orville’s arrival the press had been following the brothers everywhere, and it was becoming ever more bothersome.
To the reporters the brothers were like no one they had ever tried to cover. A correspondent for the London Daily Mail told Orville he was “the toughest proposition” newspapermen had yet run up against. He himself, said the correspondent, had already spent more money on cab fares trying to learn what the brothers were up to than he could ever hope to recover, but that he could not give up for fear some other reporter would get the “scoop.”
In mid-August, when it looked as though French interest in an agreement had revived, Wilbur and Berg returned from Berlin. Still there was no real progress with the French. Nor had there been with the Germans.