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‘cabbalistic trio’.
     
    Félix Tournachon was an uxorious man. He had married Ernestine in September 1854. It was a sudden wedding which surprised his friends: the bride was an eighteen-year-old from the Protestant bourgeoisie of Normandy. True, she had a dowry; and marriage was a useful way for Félix of escaping Life with Mother. But for all his divagations, the relationship appears to have been as tender as it was long. Tournachon quarrelled with his only brother and his only son; both were written – or wrote themselves – out of his life. Ernestine was always there. If there was a pattern to his life, she provided it. She was with him at the crash of The Giant near Hanover. Her money helped pay for his studio; later, the business was put in her name.
    In 1887, hearing of a fire at the Opéra Comique, and believing her son Paul to be there, Ernestine suffered a stroke. Félix immediately moved the household out of Paris to the Forest of Sénart, where he owned a property called L’Hermitage. They stayed there for the next eight years. In 1893 Edmond de Goncourt described the ménage in his Journal :
     
… At its centre is Mme Nadar, aphasiac, looking like an old white-haired professor. She is lying down, wrapped in a sky-blue dressing gown lined with pink silk. Next to her, Nadar takes the part of the tender nurse, tucking her brightly coloured gown around her, easing the hair off her temples, touching and stroking her all the time.
     
    Her dressing gown is bleu de ciel , the colour of the sky in which they no longer flew. Both were grounded now. In 1909, after fifty-five years of marriage, Ernestine died. That same year, Louis Blériot flew the Channel, a final endorsement of Nadar’s belief in heavier-than-air flight; the balloonist sent the aviator a telegram of congratulations. While Blériot went up into the air, Ernestine went down into the ground. While Blériot flew, Nadar had lost his rudder. He did not survive Ernestine long; he died in March 1910, surrounded by his dogs and cats.
     
    By now, few remembered his achievement at Petit-Bicêtre in the autumn of 1858. And the aerostatic photographs that exist are of only passable quality: we must imagine the excitement back into them. But they represent a moment when the world grew up. Or perhaps that is too melodramatic, and too hopeful. Perhaps the world progresses not by maturing, but by being in a permanent state of adolescence, of thrilled discovery. Still, this was an instant of cognitive change. The vestigial human outline on a cave wall, the first mirror, the development of portraiture, the science of photography – these were advances which allowed us to look at ourselves better, with increasing truth. And even if the world was largely unaware at the time of events at Petit-Bicêtre, the change could not be unchanged, unmade. And the sin of height was purged.
     
    Once, the peasant had looked up at the heavens, where God lived, fearing thunder, hail, and God’s anger, hoping for sun, a rainbow, and God’s approval. Now, the modern peasant looked up at the heavens and saw instead the less daunting arrival of Colonel Fred Burnaby, cigar in one pocket and half-sovereign in the other, of Sarah Bernhardt and her autobiographical chair, of Félix Tournachon in his airborne wicker cottage, complete with refreshment room, lavatory and photographic department.
     
    Nadar’s only surviving aerostatic photographs date from 1868. Exactly a century later, in December 1968, the Apollo 8 mission lifted off for its journey to the moon. On Christmas Eve, the spacecraft passed behind the far side of the moon and entered lunar orbit. As it emerged, the astronauts were the first humans to see a phenomenon for which a new word was needed: ‘earthrise’. The pilot of the lunar module, William Anders, using a specially adapted Hasselblad camera, photographed a two-thirds-full Earth soaring in a night sky. His pictures show it in luscious colour, with feathery