Upwind to Paris

About this book

Paris, September 1870. The Prussian army has sealed the city, and the only way out is by balloon: varnished cotton, coal gas, and young sailors who have never flown, going wherever the wind sends them. None comes back. Clémence Aubertin, fifty-one, once thrilled fairground crowds as La Comète. Now she mends barometers, drinks laudanum and swears like a carter, until she is hired to teach sailors to fly in forty-eight hours. Her pupils are a Breton boy terrified of heights, a fifteen-year-old varnisher who does sums faster than the engineers, and a pigeon-keeper's son who counts every bird that never returns. In a notebook she shows no one, Clémence has drawn a machine that could fly against the wind. Every pupil she certifies may die. Every day she spends on her engine is a day she is not training them. What does she owe the young?