No, a thousand times no!"
Then he said to his father what he had never said to anybody, and what
his comrade Constantin had merely suspected:
"That is my sole passion. One morning in the courtyard at Stanislas I
saw an airplane flying. I don't know what happened to me: I felt an
emotion so profound that it was almost religious. You must believe me
when I ask your permission to be an aviator."
"You don't know what an airplane is. You never saw one except from
below."
"You are mistaken; I went up in one at Corbeaulieu."
Corbeaulieu was an aerodrome near Compiegne; and these words were spoken
a very few months before the war.
* * * * *
Many years before Georges Guynemer was a student at Stanislas, a
professor, who was also destined to become famous, taught rhetoric
there. His name was Frederic Ozanam. He too had been a precocious child,
prematurely sure of his vocation for literature. When only fifteen he
had composed in Latin verse an epitaph in honor of Gaston de Foix, dead
at Ravenna. This epitaph, if two words are changed--_Hispanae_ into
_hostilis_, and _Gaston_ into _Georges_--describes perfectly the short
and admirable career of Guynemer.
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