During February he made many experimental flights, and finally, on March
10, 1915, went up 600 meters. This won him next day a diploma from the
Aëro Club, and the day following he wrote to his sister Odette this hymn
of joy--not long, but unique in his correspondence: "Uninterrupted
descent, volplaning for 800 meters. Superb view (sunset)...."

"Superb view (sunset)": in the hundred and fifty or two hundred letters
addressed to his family, I believe this is the only landscape. Slightly
later, but infrequently, the new aviator gave a few details of
observation, the accuracy of which lent them some picturesqueness; but
in this letter he yielded to the intoxication of the air, he enjoyed
flying as if it were his right. He experienced that sensation of
lightness and freedom which accompanies the separation from earth, the
pleasure of cleaving the wind, of controlling his machine, of seeing,
breathing, thinking differently from the way he saw and thought and
breathed on the land, of being born, in fact, into a new and solitary
life in an enlarged world. As he ascended, men suddenly diminished in
size. The earth looked as if some giant hand had smoothed its surface,
diversified only by moving shadows, while the outlines of objects became
stronger, so that they seemed to be cut in relief.

The land was marked by geometrical lines, showing man's labor and its
regularity, an immense parti-colored checker-board traversed by the
lines of highroads and rivers, and containing islands which were forests
and towns and cities. Was it the chain of the Pyrenees covered with snow
which, breaking this uniformity, wrested a cry of admiration from the
aviator? What shades of gold and purple were shed over the scene by the
setting sun? His half-sentence is like a confession of love for the joy
of living, violently torn from him, and the only avowal this blunt
Roland would allow himself.