"
Whereupon another guest asked: "Could you imagine him bragging?"
Guynemer was delighted, and when the party broke up he went out with the
gentleman who had said this and thanked him warmly. "Don't you see how
little they understand? I don't say I am modest, but if I weren't I
would be a fool, and I should not like to be that. I know quite well
that just now some of us are getting so much admiration and so many
honors that one may get more than one's share. Whereas the men in the
trenches--how different it is with them!"[24]
[Footnote 24: _Journal des Debats_ for September 26, 1917.]
But it was inevitable that he should be lionized. People came to him
with albums and pictures. He wrote to his father that a Madame de B.
wanted something, just one sentence, in an album which was to be sold in
America. "I am to be alongside the Generalissimo. What on earth can I
write?"
An American lady who was also a guest at the Hotel Edouard VII wanted to
have at any price some souvenir of the young hero. She ordered her maid
to bring away an old glove of Guynemer's which was lying on a chest of
drawers, and replace it by a magnificent bouquet.
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