Didn't know until this week that she'd already been up alone before she ever came down. Jeanne Geneviève Labrosse went solo in a balloon the year before, which means by the time anyone cut her loose over Paris she was not a passenger being handed an experience. She was crew.

The kit, as near as I can work it out: one balloon, one silk canopy, one wicker basket, a release at the top, no straps, no instruments, no reserve. That's the whole manifest. 1799, and nobody had an altimeter, so 900 metres is somebody's estimate made from the ground with a good eye. Up there it's roughly six degrees colder than the street, more if there's any wind, and it's October. She'd have come down with cold hands on cold wicker, which is the detail I'd want in the logbook and nobody recorded.

The names I actually want are the ones nobody bothered to write down: the men on the lines holding that balloon steady while it filled, the ones who walked it clear and let go clean. Then the Garnerins. André-Jacques was on the ground, a parachutist himself, and I've no doubt he had opinions about how it was going. Easy to have opinions at ground level. She was the one in the basket, and she came down fine, and then she married him anyway.