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he was determined to win the prize of one thousand pounds offered by the London Daily Mail for the first person to fly across the English Channel. At 4:35 A.M. on July 25, 1909, hobbling on crutches from an earlier accident, Blériot set off in his monoplane, a cratelike machine called the X1. He headed out to sea and soon faced head-on squalls. He pressed forward, though he could not swim and had only a small supply of water. The plane responded and eventually he landed at Dover Castle. The crossing had taken just thirty-seven minutes. When British soldiers ran up to congratulate Blériot, he responded, “Be good enough to hand me my crutches.” 26 An hour later he was joined by his wife, who had arrived by boat. Blériot received a hero’s welcome on his return and was awarded the Légion d’honneur. His achievement was a source of pride to the French, who by 1911 had more than three times as many pilots as Germany and Britain combined. 27

In conquering the air, humans violated an ancient law: the gravity that bound them to the earth. The world looked smaller from the air, easier to encompass. In the same way, the speed of automobiles gave people enormous new powers of mobility and independence. The telephone further compressed space and time. Some doubted these changes were for the better. The German writer Max Nordau feared that everyone would soon be required to “read a dozen square yards of newspaper daily… be constantly called to the telephone… think simultaneously of five continents of the earth,” and “live half their time in a railroad carriage or in a flying machine.” 28 But there was no stopping what people saw as “progress.”

France’s greatest philosopher of this era, Henri Bergson, rejected the mechanistic ordering of time by seconds and minutes, claiming instead that past and present were linked to the future by a free flow of moments, which he called “duration.” Only by taking away mundane data, he wrote, could one reach the level of consciousness that permits highly creative people to assimilate impressions from childhood to adulthood in order to live a whole and fulfilling life. It was through intuition that duration could be grasped in all its complexity. Bergson’s term for this creative and intense living in duration was élan vital, which became a catchphrase of the time.

Bergson gave free lectures each Friday at the Collège de France, open to the public. Society women and tourists as well as workers came to hear the man in his three-inch stiff collar “fashioning phrases like a sculptor with his slim white hands.” 29

Bergson believed that art played a special role in helping a person grasp “some secret chord which was only waiting to thrill.” 30 At this time, the French were among the world’s leaders in the brand-new motion picture industry, and the cinema was an ideal illustration of Bergson’s ideas. A strip of motion picture film contains many individual frames. When these are run through a projector at a certain speed, the mind perceives them not as a series of stills but as a continuous flow — in other words, duration. (The impressionist artists, in their move away from a literal representation of reality in their works, were another example. So was the literary work of Marcel Proust, who is said to have been inspired by Bergson in the conception of his six-volume novel, Remembrance of Things Past.31 )

The first French movies, made by the Lumière brothers in 1895, were little more than filmed tableaux and playlets. Soon, however, Georges Méliès, who had started his career as a magician, discovered how to work magic with a camera. He pioneered the use of trick photography, producing images that startled audiences of the time. His films showed ghosts produced by double exposures, made people abruptly appear and disappear, and transformed objects from one thing to another. Méliès’s 1902 science fiction movie A Trip to the Moon, based on Jules Verne’s novel, remains a classic. The young Picasso was fascinated by the movies; he saw his first in Barcelona in 1896. From the time of his arrival in Paris he was