The car, which was made chiefly of wicker-work, was actually a small cottage of two storeys (a ground-floor and platform or upper deck), with door and windows. Its height was about eight, and its length thirteen feet. The ground-floor contained a cruciform passage and six divisions. At one extremity was a captain's cabin with a bed in it, and underneath a compartment for luggage. At the other was the passengers' cabin, with three beds, one above the other. The four other divisions or rooms were a provision store, a lavatory, a place for conducting photographic operations, and a room for a small lithographic press, with which it was intended to print an account of the voyage, to be scattered about the localities over which they should pass! In reference to this last, Monsieur Nadar writes:-- "An English company a month ago (our neighbours are marvellous in not losing time), appreciating the bustle which the sight of a balloon always excites in every inhabited place, and judging rightly that papers would never be better received and more greedily read than those thrown overboard by us, despatched a messenger to propose to me to accept commercial prospectuses. We shall never have too much money for the construction of our first aeromotive. I have accepted and made a contract." Besides many miscellaneous articles, such as grapnels, fowling-pieces, speaking-trumpets, etcetera, that were to be carried up in this cot, there were provisions of all sorts, instruments for scientific observations, games, means of defence in case of descent among an inhospitable people, and two cages of carrier-pigeons sent from Liege. The car and all it contained was secured by twenty cables traversing on and beneath its walls, interlaced with the fabric and fastened to a large hoop just below the neck, to which hoop was also attached the ropes of the net-work, by which the balloon itself was enveloped. There were two axles and four wheels connected with the car, by means of which it could, when necessary, be drawn along an ordinary road. Canes, disposed to act as springs, were placed underneath and round the middle of it to protect it from concussions, besides which internal buoys and an immense girdle in compartments of inflated india-rubber, rendered it incapable of submersion in water. Such was the giant balloon in which Monsieur Nadar and his friends made two ascents; of the first of which (4th October 1863) Galignani writes thus:--