Saint-exupery: A Biography

by Stacy Schiff

  For some reason the Saint-Exupéry brothers arrived in Fribourg at the Villa Saint-Jean several weeks into the term in November 1915. Antoine entered as a twelfth-grader, for what is in France the penultimate year of secondary school education. Charles Sallès made the acquaintance of the newcomer almost immediately, when Saint-Exupéry sat down next to him in the refectory. The two were summertime neighbors—Sallès’s grandparents lived across the river from Ambérieu—and appear to have vaguely recognized each other. The introductions over, Saint-Exupéry exploded: “Guess what? I’ve been up in a plane. It’s incredible!” He talked of nothing else for the course of the meal, his new friend rapt at his side. He had found a subject that engaged him entirely, one which brought him back, more or less, to earth. And he had met his destiny, even if it would spend the next eleven years eluding him.

  * They would go far with this imported technology: France entered World War I with more aircraft than any nation save Germany and quickly became the premier producer of Allied planes. The United States would not recover its preeminence in the air until after Lindbergh’s arrival in Paris in 1927.

  * Appropriately, Jacques de Lesseps, the son of the engineer of the Suez Canal, was the second man to fly across the English Channel.

  * In central Le Mans it is now possible to walk from the rue Wilbur Wright, down the avenue Bollée, to the rue Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

  † With one exception: in 1913 Igor Sikorsky built the first transport airplane in St. Petersburg. In 1914 he flew in it, with four others, to Kiev, stopping only once.

  IV

  ~

  Lost Horizons

  1915–1920

  In France being a barefooted boy is usually preparation for becoming not President but a barefooted man.

  JANET FLANNER, Paris Was Yesterday

  This first of Saint-Exupéry’s exiles proved a tonic. Removed both from the indulgences of Saint-Maurice and from the rigors of the Jesuits, the fifteen-year-old seems to have begun to come into his own. The Villa Saint-Jean was the only school to which we know he made a pilgrimage as an adult; it was as well the only school he would visit in his writing, facts that suggest a certain degree of attachment. “With melancholy” the narrator of Southern Mail recalled his home, “a white-gabled house among the pines, one window lighting up and then another.” This was recognizably the Villa Saint-Jean, although Saint-Exupéry’s description made the handsome school sound more modest than it was; its campus was by far the most luxurious he had yet known. A tidy red-roofed village unto itself, the school overlooked the sleepy town of Fribourg; beyond its extensive playing fields lay a thick wood. It was a trilingual institution, of which half the 1,000 students were Swiss and better than half the foreigners French. No wall separated its well-kept grounds from the outside world; the prevailing sentiment was one of trust.

  The Marianist school had been founded in 1903 in part as a tribute to the British public school system. It was again an institution for the privileged but it was also a liberal one, at which contact between teachers and students was frequent and warm, news of the outside world welcome (though in these years not generally happy; its alumni pool shrank considerably in World War I), and excellence rewarded with independence. The accomplished student could, for example, aspire to a private upper-story room near the professors, a distinction to which Saint-Exupéry never laid claim on academic grounds. The school’s prospectus advised its staff “not to be less attentive to the boys’ ‘education’ than to their instruction,” a lesson imported directly from Britain. Its teachers were to “relax, to humanize, the regimen of boarding school life, in order to divorce it from its worst drawbacks.” The administration very much took the attitude that discipline was better instilled in its students than imposed from above, an idea that may not have met with much visible success with the young Saint-Exupéry but which would get more than its due years later in his work. “I like it here,” the Saint-Jean student informed his mother in a statement that could serve as an epigraph to his glory days. “It’s a little severe, but everyone is imbued with a great sense of justice.”

  The Villa Saint-Jean was assuredly a better match than the Jesuits had been for the quixotic poet of Saint-Maurice, but it was still too early for this future champion of subordination to commit entirely to the demands of academic life. Regularly he was reprimanded for failing to speak German, as was required, at the dinner table; he responded to these accusations in French. While the German language—and in fact all foreign languages—would remain his undoing, he honed his Swiss accent to perfection and for years would regale friends with a singsong, Fribourgeois rendition of Hugo, Mallarmé, or Verlaine. In the classroom he continued on his erratic way, making off with an occasional high grade in French or Latin and as commonly functioning as the lanterne rouge—idiomatically, “taillight,” said of that student who literally brought up the rear—in regular classroom work. His grades in geography were during both years the lowest in the class, a distinction he did not seem to forget and in which there was irony of several kinds. The narrator of The Little Prince regrets having given up a promising career as a painter for such prosaic matters as geography at the age of six. He comments dryly that, having flown all over the world, he now has reason to proclaim that subject useful. At a glance he can tell China from Arizona: “It’s a helpful subject, if one loses one’s way at night.”

  Childhood humiliations are perhaps more often revisited than childhood triumphs, even when outnumbered. It is, however, interesting to note that the memories Saint-Exupéry chose to record of his school days are Fribourg examples of distraction, failure, or punishment. At the outset of Flight to Arras he is a fifteen-year-old dedicated to a geometry problem, working away “dutifully with compass and rule and protractor.” A few lines later a tree branch swaying in the breeze has caught his attention: “From an industrious pupil I have become an idle one.” Under examination by his commanding officer after a 1940 reconnaissance flight he is reminded of his discomfort when asked how to integrate Bernoulli’s equation, a paralysis with which he seemed well-acquainted: “You stiffened under the teacher’s gaze, motionless, fixed in place like an insect on a pin.” He will, he fears, “flunk like a schoolboy standing before all the class at a blackboard.” The boarding school teachers whom the narrator of Southern Mail visits after he has begun his career as a mail pilot demonstrate a great indulgence for their protégé’s “erstwhile sloth.” For his part he is happy to reveal the limits of the masters’ knowledge. They who had terrorized him with geography tests had never themselves visited Africa and now they quizzed him for the truth, for the secrets they had taught but only he had learned. It would hardly have been appropriate if the author of the line “Is being a man knowing the sum of the angles of a triangle and the longitude of Rangoon?” had turned out to have been a diligent student.

  As usual Saint-Exupéry brought his talents to bear on everything outside of the assigned course of study. He continued to read widely—it was at this time that he discovered and feasted on Dostoyevsky (“I felt at once that I had entered into communication with something vast”)—and was again famed for his poetry. “I worshiped Baudelaire,” he wrote of his sixteen-year-old self in 1941, “and must admit shamefacedly that I learned all of Leconte de Lisle and Heredia by heart, and Mallarmé as well.” Traces of Baudelaire, who would by no means have figured in the 1915 or 1916 Saint-Jean curriculum, turn up in Saint-Exupéry’s Fribourg poems, all of them passionate but amateurish efforts, several of which indicate that Odette de Sinéty had been replaced in his affections. Valuable scraps of scribbled-upon paper littered his pockets, as later they would the cockpits in which he flew. Generally he had two or three poems in progress; he was inspired enough to produce, in his second year, two philosophy compositions for each one assigned, the second for a classmate in need. (“Already a great concern for bailing out his friends!” boasted an ex-professor in 1951, when he was presumably more good-natured about the practice than he had been at
the time.)

  One report from Fribourg has Saint-Exupéry excelling on the soccer field, on which he served as goalie and center forward, and at fencing, but if Saint-Jean’s excellent facilities brought out this athleticism it was short-lived. He would remain a confirmed non-sportif. Whatever talent he did possess proved again a matter of will: his history professor described a clumsy child who “tipped over the table and, repeatedly, the pitcher of milk and the coffee pot, but whose big, long-fingered hands, when the time came to build a paper model, or take apart a complex mechanical object, took on all the nimbleness of a lacemaker.” Years later he was asked, after the near-demise of a teacup he had let slip in a drawing room, if he was terribly clumsy or very agile. “Very agile,” he responded, pointing out that in the end he had broken nothing.

  On the literary front he proved more consistent. His memory for verse was excellent and his enthusiasm for theater as avid as it had been at Saint-Maurice. He played Molière beautifully, and proved as brilliant and witty an extracurricular debater as he was unremarkable in the classroom. Dressed as the doctor in Le Malade imaginaire, Saint-Exupéry looks much as he does in all photographs of the time: long-suffering, awkward, self-contained, ill at ease. By now he was a good head taller than his classmates; his height relegates him to the last row in every extant group photograph. He appears no more unhappy in a photo taken of him in detention at Saint-Jean than in any other shot. His blond curls had long flattened and darkened, so that his hair was less his most striking feature than the upturned nose, which would have been any schoolboy’s undoing. Entirely like his father’s, his flat, brown eyes floated up a little in their sockets, where they were dramatically anchored by dark, low brows. This lent the sixteen-year-old a sort of owlish appearance. Later Saint-Exupéry could look either very odd or very handsome, a cross between the actor Wallace Shawn and a young Orson Welles; as a schoolboy he appeared mostly gangly and sullen. With a single smile, however, he became mischief incarnate. The transformation was remarkable enough for a friend to comment in the 1930s that Saint-Exupéry “left permanent wounds in the hearts of those who saw him smile, even once.” At Fribourg the child’s smile was only just beginning to rival the childish timidity; it was more his distraction than his boisterousness that interfered with his studies. Saint-Exupéry did move enough out of himself at this time to make his first close friends, all three of them from the Lyons area. To Charles Sallès he added as his intimates Louis de Bonnevie and—possibly over the summer of 1916—Marc Sabran. Bonnevie’s mother was evidently more able than Madame de Saint-Exupéry to make the trip to Switzerland and stood in for her on occasion when a maternal presence was called for; her handsome, sandy-haired son was twice as introverted as Saint-Exupéry and somewhat prone to depression. Witty and charming, a few years Saint-Exupéry’s elder, Sabran, too, was a particularly sensitive boy, one who shared Saint-Exupéry’s appreciation for music and poetry. Along with François, who was distinguishing himself in music and art at Saint-Jean, these were Antoine’s first confidants.

  Saint-Exupéry took these friends from the Fribourg years but left something as well. Despite his mother’s piety and his years with the Jesuits he did not turn into much of a Catholic. He by no means turned his back on spirituality, with which his fascination only grew as he aged; he well understood the importance of religion, and often claimed to regret having lost his connection to the Church. Nor has his lapsed faith discouraged religious readings of his work, which are legion. Saint-Exupéry repeatedly declared, however, that he “lost his faith when he was chez the Marianists,” who, it was true, were a liberal, egalitarian order more devoted to education than to the Church. Religious instruction was not overly emphasized in Saint-Exupéry’s first year (its study was accorded two hours weekly, less than were French, Latin, Greek, or German), and the subject was taught alongside philosophy the second year.

  Numerous reasons have been put forth to explain this loss of faith, or to rediscover it tucked away in odd places. The alienation from the Church assuredly had more to do with the man than with the Marianists, however; his quirky, highly individualistic approach to things tallied as poorly with organized religion as it did with organized education. In 1917 Saint-Exupéry wrote his mother to say he was confessing weekly, although he was then enrolled in a lay school and this was not required of him. After this date no evidence exists of his ever having set foot in a church again for religious reasons. The hero of his first novel does, “offering himself up to faith as to any mental discipline,” but finds in Notre-Dame-de-Paris more cries of desperation than acts of faith and leaves the cathedral disappointed. Saint-Exupéry’s Fribourg physics professor was impressed by his student’s scientific acumen when he demonstrated the power of metal to block X-rays by placing a crucifix on a photographic plate exposed to radiation. More than a show of scientific genius, the experiment represented a neat metaphor for the brilliant gaze the aviator would later cast on the ideas with which he had first been educated.

  In the fall of 1916 Saint-Exupéry bought himself a collapsible Kodak camera, with which he hoped to experiment. He wrote his mother that he was playing the violin a good deal and asked her to send on records. He reported that he was working hard, although he was discouraged by his thorough lack of aptitude for German. Otherwise he sounded happy. A September letter offers a glimpse of his brand of whimsical ingenuity, as of his ability to make light of his own folly. Returning to Fribourg for the new semester, he had been smitten, at the Swiss border, by the idea of traveling light: “Maman, you cannot know how pleasant it is to be as light as air, as free as the wind.” Accordingly he had stored all of his belongings in his trunk, which he left, with his Saint-Jean address, for its customs inspection; he knew he could send a porter to the Swiss station to pick it up for him. On his arrival in Fribourg he ran into one of his professors, who immediately remarked on the returning student’s lack of a suitcase. Saint-Exupéry explained his clever arrangements with pride. “And I was congratulating myself all over again on my genius when the porter returned with the awful news: The trunk was not there!” Thenceforth he had met every train at the Fribourg station, waiting with the same hungry attention as a magpie in La Fontaine fixes on the glittering attire of a nobleman. “And each time I went back to school with a longer face, looking stranded; I must have resembled the cast-offs of the Medusa.… I had nothing! Not even a shirt collar, not even a toothbrush.” Several days later the trunk arrived safely. It was not difficult to see why its owner’s professors so often termed their student “un original.”

  Neither this letter nor any others surviving from the Fribourg years bear a trace of the war that had already claimed over a million French lives, save for that in which Saint-Exupéry took it upon himself to inform his mother that French nurses were entitled to three weeks’ holiday in Switzerland at the government’s expense. Why did she not take advantage of this leave to visit her sons at Fribourg? The war makes more of an appearance in Saint-Exupéry’s poetry, in which he laments both its destruction and his distance from the front. At Saint-Jean he was as insulated from the war as one could have been on the Continent between 1915 and 1917; the school was rabidly pro-French, and daily communiqués from the front were posted for the boys, but the only contact with the reality of the conflict came in the unmenacing form of Swiss troops, who occasionally camped on the Saint-Jean lawns during maneuvers.

  Two other trials claimed Saint-Exupéry’s more immediate attention in Fribourg. All of his schooling to this time constituted preparation for the baccalauréat exam, the Frenchman’s passport to higher learning. While not nearly as inevitable as it is today, the exam was compulsory for the son of a good family. Saint-Exupéry passed the first part of his bac, in literature, in June 1916 at the Sorbonne. He stayed with his great-aunt, the Baronne Fernand de Fonscolombe, with whom he made what was almost certainly his first visit to the Comédie-Française. If his letters to his mother regarding the practical details of this trip are any indication, he was
as nervous as are today’s candidates before the exam. He must have worked very hard in the weeks preceding the two-day ordeal; statistically, only one in two students passed the bac at the time. He certainly worked diligently in the examination hall. “I this minute left the Sorbonne,” he reported to his mother, “where I’ve just finished my Latin essay as well as that of my neighbor, a very nice but entirely dim-witted boy. Tomorrow I shall do his Greek translation.” To his second baccalauréat, in philosophy, he submitted successfully the following summer in Lyons. These were the first important exams in his life, and the last ones, officially speaking, he would pass.