A dozen or more ribs were broken, one wing ruined, the cloth torn in countless places. Everything was a tangled mess. Radiators were smashed, propeller axles broken, coils badly turned up, essential wires, seats, nuts, and bolts, all missing.
In a letter written that same day he exploded at Orville as he rarely had, charging him with the worst example of packing he had ever seen. “I am sure that with a scoop shovel I could have put things in within two or three minutes and made fully as good a job of it. I never saw such evidences of idiocy.” It was going to take much longer than he had figured to get everything ready to go, and there was no Orville or Charlie Taylor to help.
He set immediately to work, putting things in order and making repairs. “Worked all today and a few hours yesterday replacing broken ribs in the surfaces,” he recorded in his diary June 18.
Had to take one wing entirely down to fix it. Found many things not as well as in the old machine. Rear wire not inside of cloth right; little washers on this wire not on the proper side of ribs; no blocks to hold end ribs of sections from slipping back; no steel ferrules on front lower spar under heavy uprights; not play enough in rear hinges joining sections; no cloth wrapping around spar where screw frames fasten on.
The mechanics at the Bollée factory did as best they could to help, but were of little use at first. “I have had an awful job sewing the section together,” he informed Orville in another letter. “I was the only one strong enough in the fingers to pull the wires together tight, so I had all the sewing to do myself. . . . My hands were about raw when I was not half done.”
“In putting things together,” he added, “I notice many evidences that your mind was on something else while you worked last summer.”
But then Wilbur learned that the chaos and damage had not been caused at Dayton, but at Le Havre by careless French customs inspectors, and he apologized to Orville at once. Orville, knowing the stress his brother was under, made no issue of the matter.
Wilbur labored on steadily, installing uprights and wires, and fixing the old engine after finding work he had had done on it by French mechanics “so bad,” he had to give a full day to it. “I have to do practically all the work myself, as it is almost impossible to explain what I want in words to men who only one fourth understand English.”
True to the Wright rules of life, he did not work on Sundays, but instead wrote letters or went sightseeing. He was living most comfortably at the Hôtel du Dauphin, where, according to the Motor Car Journal, one found “nothing of luxe—simply plain, bountiful fare cooked and served by the patron-chef,” which proved exactly to Wilbur’s liking. And Le Mans, he was pleased to say, was an “old fashioned town, almost as much out of the world as Kitty Hawk.” He loved the sound of the chimes—Bollée bells—from the church across the square and was happy to provide those at home with a lengthy description of the town’s crowning edifice, the colossal Cathédrale Saint-Julien.
Set on a hill first settled by the Romans above the Sarthe River, it rose high over a thick cluster of medieval buildings and houses that constituted the oldest part of town. There was no steeple. Instead, the cathedral’s singular exterior distinction was its prominent double buttresses. But beyond that was the rare combination of both the Romanesque and Gothic styles all in one building and best seen within. That part built in the Romanesque manner dated back nearly nine hundred years, to the eleventh century, while the larger, more spectacular segment had risen out of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and it was this, so plainly in evidence, that so moved Wilbur.
As he wrote to Katharine, “The arches forming the openings between the aisles and the choir keep increasing in height so that a person standing against the outside wall of the outer aisle can see way up to the top of the choir and take in the magnificent stained glass windows of the clerestory.” One saw not only the light and brilliant color of the ancient windows, but all the light and color that the windows threw onto the upper reaches of the arches some 108 feet above the cathedral floor.
If at the time he felt or reflected on any connection between the upward aspiration of this stunning human creation and his own unrelenting efforts in that direction, he made no mention. But it seems most unlikely that he would not have.
Attending a Sunday service at the cathedral some days later, Wilbur found the only part he could understand or participate in was the collection. Still, the great structure, he told Katharine, “impresses me more and more as one of the finest specimens of architecture I have seen.”
Meanwhile, just outside the cathedral, as he added, a farmer’s market filled the public square and, to cap it all, a traveling circus had set up camp.
He wrote of the comforts of the hotel, praising the food especially. The meals were better than any he had had since coming to Europe—better in that they were both plentiful and not overly fancy. He described a lunch that included sliced tomatoes, cucumbers, roast tongue with mushrooms, lamb chops with new potatoes, “some sort of cake,” and almonds. He had never been so comfortable away from home, he said, implying perhaps that a place like the Meurice had been far too luxurious for comfort. No one at the hotel understood a word of his English, but all did their best to serve him well.
A first encounter with alphabet soup provided opportunity for a touch of the wit he knew Katharine especially would appreciate:
I was a little astonished and disturbed the other evening, when I sat down to dinner to find my soup which was a sort of noodle soup, turning into all sorts of curious forms and even letters of the alphabet. I began to think I had the “jim jams.” On close investigation I found that the dough had been run through forms so as to make the different letters of the alphabet and figures, too! It was like looking into the “hell box” of a printing office, and was all the more amusing because every mouthful of soup you take out, brought up a new combination.
Progress at the Bollée factory was hardly improving, however. “I have to do all the work myself as there are no drawings to show anyone how things go together, and explanations take more time than doing things myself.
I have a man but he is not a first class mechanic; he has no invention or initiative, and his vocabulary is limited. When I say to him, “Hand me the screwdriver,” he is liable to stand and gawk or more often rush off as though he really understood me, and it is only after I have waited a long time and finally got it myself that I realize that he does not understand the special meaning of the word “hand” as I used it.