In Europe

thirty or forty years from now. Every detail speaks of an unparalleled feeling for quality: the automatic ticket system, the uniform prices, the clear signposting, the high frequency of departures, the seemingeffortlessness with which the trains rocket all these thousands of people through the city.
    You rarely see anyone running for a train: the next one will be coming in two to four minutes. One seldom feels unsafe: there are always people around, every corner is put to good use. And only very rarely is one ever tempted to go by car: nothing can equal the speed, for example, of the RER connection between the Eiffel Tower and Versailles. And most amazing of all is that the system has been running exactly this way for many years, as though it is the most normal thing in the world. If you want to catch a glimpse of the future, you need only travel around Paris for an afternoon.
    Meanwhile, my antiquated Baedeker has started baulking. The outskirts of Paris today comprise a jungle of factories, warehouses and tower blocks, but the foldable map at the guide's centre shows light-green fields and woods, with villages such as Neuilly, Pantin and Montreuil. Le Bourget is a market town along a tributary of the Seine. Later it housed the most famous airport in Paris; today that airport is a museum.
    Originally, my expedition to Le Bourget was dedicated to the airplane in which Louis Blériot became the first man to fly across the Channel on 25 July, 1909, but in the end I spend the entire morning ogling the machines built by his predecessors, the bunglers and the bluffers. See here the building blocks of progress: intelligence, nonconformity and, above all, chutzpah. Take Félix du Temple's steam-powered airplane, for example, built in 1857; I know nothing about the man himself, but I can see him before me in his workshop: his plane is of the flapping-swallow variety, atop it a ship's rudder, beside that a burnished copper kettle complete with steam whistle. Or Traia Vuia's square cart, a fixed wing attached to the top of something that looks like the under-carriage of a pram, in which the first manned flight was made in France on 18 March, 1906, over a distance of twelve metres, at a height of fifty centimetres.
    Then there is the machine that belonged to Louis Blériot himself. I found an old newspaper article by the Dutch correspondent Alexander Cohen, dealing with a series of aviation experiments at the parade grounds in Issy-les-Moulineaux late on a dusky Friday afternoon, 22 November, 1907. Cohen watched M. Farman leave the ground in a ‘giant insect’ ofcanvas, bamboo and aluminium, and fly for several hundred metres. Which was more than could be said of Blériot's ‘flying beast’.
    The
Libellule
, as Blériot's juggernaut was called, put-putted across the parade grounds at breakneck speed, made several impressive pirouettes, but never left the ground.
    A little more than eighteen months later, however, Blériot climbed aboard this construct of filament and canvas and flew to England. Just before the flight, his machine seemed on the point of falling apart: the fish glue holding it together had started to rot. Just before departure, he casually asked someone which direction it was to Dover.
    And then there are the photographs of the airmen. Voniman (1909, with cap) stares straight ahead, behind him an engine that looks as if it belongs in an ocean-going freighter. Coudron (1910, Breton beret) has something casual about him, he looks as though he stands a chance. Gilbert (1910, suit and tie), looking like a respectable family man, is lying in a sort of hammock beneath his bamboo aircraft. The entire plane is hung with tassels. I look Octave Gilbert right in the eye. His fatherly hands nervously grip the little reins attached to the two bicycle wheels that comprise his landing gear. Fear, dignity: for him, all that is subordinate to progress. His face, full of courage and despair.

Chapter THREE
London
    ‘ I STILL RELISH YOUNG PEOPLE'S AMAZEMENT WHEN I TELL THEM THAT , before 1915, I travelled to India and America without possessing a passport, without actually ever having seen one,’ Stefan Zweig wrote in 1941.
    My Baedeker guide, too, considers a passport superfluous, ‘but they often prove useful in establishing the traveller's identity when one wishes to gain admission to museums on days when they are closed to the general public.’
    The passport was part of life in Western Europe for less than a century,