Whenever war came, people always found ways to solve problems they would never normally have considered, such as communication.
On October 18, 1870, a postal balloon named "Victor Hugo" rose from Place de la Concorde. Victor Hugo attended the launch ceremony and mailed a letter to London. That same day, he visited Emperor Avenue. The house and garden where he had lived as a child were gone, replaced by a new street cutting through the old site.
France actually had wired telegraphs at the time. Britain had even laid an undersea cable to America, carried by the famous Agamemnon.
But during wartime, telegraphs were controlled. Abraham Lincoln understood the importance of telegraphs well; it could even be said that the victory in the American Civil War was connected to the telegraph wires the federal government's military telegraph corps had risked their lives to lay. During the American Civil War, all civilian telegraphs were shut down, and Morse code was used for secrecy. During crucial battles, Lincoln even slept directly on the little bed at the telegraph office. When cables were cut, every conceivable method—balloons, pigeons, messengers, and more—had to be used to get letters out.
One piece of information could build a Rothschild family and change many other things. On the night of November 29, 1870, when Victor Hugo crossed Richelieu Street from Rohan Palace on his way home, he saw a very tall building on the other side of the library. One of its sixth-floor windows stood open. The street was empty and pitch-black, yet bright light shone from the window, as though from a kerosene lamp. The light appeared several times, then the window closed, and the street became pitch-black again.
At the time, the great writer merely recorded what he had seen as a passerby. He thought