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.
They drive up in carriages and pairs with gold-braided coachmen and footmen, and Wright shoulders an umbrella for a walk through the rain to the house where the dinner happens to be. . . . He is just himself in the most refreshing way.
During an extended conversation with Wilbur one evening at the Bergs’ apartment on the Champs-Elysées, it became clear to the correspondent how greatly Wilbur enjoyed Paris. “He has too keen an appreciation of the beautiful not to do so.”
In early December, with winter setting in, Wilbur sent the Comte de Lambert to the southern reaches of France to look over the fashionable resort town of Pau, close to the Pyrénées Mountains and the border of Spain, as a possible location at which to continue the demonstrations. It was where de Lambert had grown up, a town of some 34,000 people known for its fourteenth-century castles, its foxhunting and eighteen-hole golf course (the first on the continent), and what was considered one of the most appealing winter climates in Europe.
The prospect of visiting a destination so popular with the high society of England and Europe might also, Wilbur hoped, further entice Orville and Katharine—Katharine especially—to join him there for an extended stay. A few months in such a place would do them both great good, he wrote to her. “I know that you love ‘Old Steele’ [her high school], but I think you would love it still better if the briny deep separated it from you for a while. We will be needing a social manager and can pay enough salary to make the proposition attractive. So do not worry about the six [dollars] per day the school board gives you.”
But she had already made up her mind. “Brother and I are coming over as soon as we can,” she wrote only a few days later, in advance of his letter reaching Dayton. She had only to make satisfactory arrangements for the Bishop, who had just turned eighty and was not up to such a trip.