The half-empty balloon, fluttering its empty end
as an elephant waves his trunk, caused the airship's stern to
point upward at an alarming angle. What I most feared therefore
was that the unequal strain on the suspension wires would break
them one by one and so precipitate me to the ground.

Why was the balloon fluttering an empty end causing all this
extra danger? How was it that the rotary ventilator was not
fulfilling its purpose in feeding the interior air balloon and in
this manner swelling out the gas balloon around it? The answer
must be looked for in the nature of the accident. The rotary
ventilator stopped working when the motor itself stopped, and I
had been obliged to stop the motor to prevent the propeller from
tearing the suspension wires near it when the balloon first began
to sag from loss of gas. It is true that the ventilator which was
working at that moment had not proved sufficient to prevent the
first sagging. It may have been that the interior balloon refused
to fill out properly. The day after the accident when my balloon
constructor's man came to me for the plans of a "No. 6" balloon
envelope I gathered from something he said that the interior
balloon of "No. 5," not having been given time for its varnish to
dry before being adjusted, might have stuck together or stuck to
the sides or bottom of the outer balloon. Such are the rewards of
haste.

I was falling. At the same time the wind was carrying me toward
the Eiffel Tower. It had already carried me so far that I was
expecting to land on the Seine embankment beyond the Trocadero.
My basket and the whole of the keel had already passed the
Trocadero hotels, and had my balloon been a spherical one it
would have cleared the building. But now at the last critical
moment, the end of the long balloon that was still full of gas
came slapping down on the roof just before clearing it. It
exploded with a great noise; struck after being blown up. This
was the terrific explosion described in the newspaper of the day.

I had made a mistake in my estimate of the wind's force, by a few
yards. Instead of being carried on to fall on the Seine
embankment, I now found myself hanging in my wicker basket high
up in the courtyard of the Trocadero hotels, supported by my
airship's keel