Saint-exupery: A Biography

by Stacy Schiff

  As a measure of how impressionable the seventeen-year-old student was we have his account of his lunch with the Duchess de Vendôme, sister of the king of Belgium. His Aunt Anaïs, his father’s sister, was the Duchess’s lady-in-waiting and had wrangled an invitation for her nephew. Saint-Exupéry proved far more taken with his brush with royalty than had his mother in her youth. His fascination with the titled—and in the end with many of Paris’s indulgences—would prove short-lived, but in the fall of 1917 he was still a wide-eyed provincial who burst with pride at having made his way through a stately luncheon without a single gaffe or muddled phrase. His savoir-faire was rewarded: the Duchess promised to invite him one Sunday to the Comédie-Française, an offer on which she made good several weeks later. He was as struck by the honor as by the location of the Duchess’s seats, each of which cost almost as much as his treasured Kodak. To his Aunt Alix de Saint-Exupéry he grew closer as well at this time; he attributed her kindnesses toward him as the direct result of his “irreproachable” new wardrobe, the end result of the demands he had made on his mother. He painted a clear schoolboy’s picture of an outing with his father’s sister: “It was with her, Aunt Anaïs, Madame-I-don’t-know-who (she went to Morocco and has the Légion d’Honneur and Aunt Anaïs is very fond of her, do you know who I mean?) and also another ardent and enthusiastic Royalist lady that we went to have tea in a well-stocked pâtisserie which my stomach did justice.”

  The way to an adolescent’s heart is not difficult to divine, especially in wartime. Parisian pâtisseries were by now open only four days a week and were less and less able, given shortages of sugar, butter, and flour, to turn out Saint-Exupéry’s much-loved macaroons and truffles. They were instead creative with meringues, which, like all pâtisserie, were not by law to be consumed on the spot. Looking back, André Malraux wrote that, embarrassingly, his chief memory of the final days of the war was of margarine. He was less lucky than Saint-Exupéry, who in 1918 described another Lestrange aunt: “Aunt Rose is as ever a delight, and what is most delightful about her, aside from her sterling morals, are her goûters. She has me over for goûter on Sunday, and I swear to you that I leave with enough butter in my stomach for the whole week—fresh, melting, exquisite.”

  In Paris, despite the round of goûters, the theater-going, and the leisurely promenades, Saint-Exupéry had the war on his doorstep. Had he and his friends looked closely they would have seen patches of beans and carrots growing among the handsome chestnut paths of the Luxembourg. As of early 1918 the deepest subway stations were marked not “MÉTRO” but “REFUGE”; the city’s concierges had happily taken charge of a series of neighborhood shelters, marked by black-and-white signs. Word had got around that a window to which paper was stuck would not shatter in a bombing, and soon every pane of Parisian glass, every mirror in the city, was taped, often decoratively, some to the point of mummification. The city was a virtual military parade ground as thousands of soldiers passed through in every conceivable kind of uniform, habitually mixing at the Café de la Paix with a host of admirers. All this proved an enchantment to an adolescent, even during the longest and coldest winter of the war. Saint-Exupéry’s first account of an anxious Paris, late in 1917, in which nine out of ten streetlights had been extinguished, verged on the poetic: “All of Paris is painted blue. The trams have their blue lights; at the Lycée Saint-Louis the corridor lights are blue. Now when one looks out over Paris from a high window the city looks like a giant inkstain—not a single reflection, not a halo, a striking degree of nonluminosity!”

  The blue-out interfered less with life as the city had known it than did the events of early 1918, at which point the nighttime streets of Paris were empty save for les hirondelles, caped policemen on bicycles. In March Big Bertha began to shell Paris from a forest seventy-five miles away; at about this time the schoolboy excitement overran any artistic sensibility. To Louis de Bonnevie Saint-Exupéry wrote with tremendous excitement that he had finally “witnessed a bit of war”:

  It was just after midnight; I was sleeping soundly and having the most exciting dream (I was dreaming that I was a railroad engineer and that my locomotive couldn’t stop) when I was awakened by an odd noise. I opened my eyes to see a proctor in front of me, a candle in his hand, waking up the dormitory. I thought, “He’s crazy! Why doesn’t he turn on the lights?” I was certain it was time to get up. Equally perplexed, my neighbor checked his watch and suddenly jumped up:—But it’s quarter to twelve. Ah, zut, alors! But it’s the Zeppelins!—Great, that makes up for being awoken.… And in fact, I heard: pan … panpan … panpan, panpanpan, panpan … The cannon got louder and louder and all of a sudden rockets flew up on all sides; some headed out once launched, others blossomed into crowns and burst into a thousand stars. It’s magical! … It’s the first time I’ve seen the war and it’s really incredible when it takes place in the air.

  He acted out the drama in vivid detail for Bonnevie and Simone in March 1918, when the three took the train together to the south of France for Easter vacation.

  The result of this attack—which Saint-Exupéry assured his friend they would find in no newspaper—was a significant casualty list. The Magasins Réunis had been reduced to rubble; three bombs had fallen across from the École des Mines on the Boulevard Saint-Michel; a six-story apartment building had disappeared along with its forty inhabitants. Papers floated down from the sky on which the Germans had scrawled “À demain soir” and “À bientôt. “(In all, the Gothas bombed Paris seventy-seven times, and Big Bertha was responsible for forty-four attacks.) Saint-Exupéry promised that if the enemy returned that evening he would race up to the roof to observe the activity better. In the meantime, would Bonnevie mind terribly sharing his letter with Simone, as it would be a bore to have to write the same account twice? He hoped that Simone would understand what a trial he had undergone and suggested she calm his shattered nerves with chocolate truffles.

  Saint-Exupéry’s ebullience was general, and the next time the bombs fell most of the Lycée Saint-Louis indeed clamored to the roof to watch. The schoolboys’ imprudence was shared by the population at large, which demonstrated a marked preference for going up instead of down during the bombings. The number of casualties—some five hundred people were killed in all and more than twice as many wounded—was greatly inflated by this curiosity, which kept Parisians glued to upper-story windows or chatting in the streets when they should have been safely underground. (On the rue de Fleurus Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas never descended farther than the concierge’s loge.) Saint-Exupéry missed not a second of this impressive display, for which he was “very well-seated.” To his mother he regretted that he could not give a full accounting of the damages, on account of the censors, a consideration which seemed to hinder him only sporadically. He was happy to observe that the effect of the destruction was to turn the most committed pacifist into an ardent patriot, however: “That will put an end to the apathy about the war which is slowly infecting the population.”

  Watching Paris burn could not have had less of an effect on the Saint-Louis students, a great majority of whom would have their love of country put to the test twenty years later. Saint-Exupéry approved less and less of the administration’s vow to pack the boys off to the basement during the next bombing: “What a bunch of chickens!” With the good-natured enthusiasm of a sportscaster he narrated the Germans’ progress: “The Gothas are back. What a country! It’s impossible to sleep! Today they made an unbelievable mess, ten times worse than the day before yesterday.” The victims were this time innumerable and a huge number of buildings had been destroyed, many near the Lycée itself. Three bombs intended for the neighboring Ministry of War had fallen next to the Baronne de Fonscolombe’s apartment on the rue Saint-Dominique. None of this was the kind of news a mother might wish to receive. “N.B.,” Madame de Saint-Exupéry’s son signed off after a detailed account of the destruction, “I am alive.”

  He may have prized his ringside seat but the lyc
ée administration viewed it as a great danger: to cure the incorrigible habit of rooftop viewings, the older Saint-Louis students were, in the spring of 1918—probably just after a horrific Good Friday attack by Big Bertha that spurred the first real exodus from Paris—packed off to the Lycée Lakanal, twenty miles south of the city. Neither the students’ fascination nor their viewing habits were cured by this displacement. “It’s a beautiful evening, which means I can safely predict: Gothas, wake-up, cellar,” wrote Saint-Exupéry to his mother. “I wish you were here to experience the artillery barrage just once. You would think yourself in the middle of a terrible storm, of a hurricane. It’s magnificent.” It was far from the last time that her son’s enthusiasms must have cost Madame de Saint-Exupéry a night’s sleep. He assured her, however, that were the Germans to enter Paris he would escape on foot. “Useless,” he reasoned lucidly, “to take the train.”

  The Armistice was only months away but the bombs fell more and more frequently; by mid-June one could count on the Gothas at night and Big Bertha’s shells by day. The city emptied—by the summer nearly one million Parisians had left—but also resiliently continued on her way, taking the new dangers, the higher prices, the suffer rations in admirable stride. The Bois de Boulogne was jammed on Sundays. The theater, the cinema, the post, the banks, the markets did business more or less as usual. Restaurants and cafés remained open and crowded, although they did so with severely restricted menus and curtailed hours. Pâtisseries resorted to stocking their shelves with fresh fruit. At the Lycée Lakanal the severity of the situation impressed itself in gastronomic terms: Saint-Exupéry complained that his stomach was as empty as a cistern and that he was on the verge of dying of hunger. He was no longer in the market for chocolate truffles: he entreated his mother to send hard-boiled eggs, pâté en croûte, and bread, posthaste.

  ~

  Events did not favor the naval candidate any more than he favored his studies. He spent part of the summer of 1918 in Besançon, in the east of France, as a guest of General Vidal and his wife, family friends who appear to have offered to supervise his studies. He wrote Simone that he was making a heroic effort with his work, getting up at 5:30 and putting in five hours of physics and five hours of German a day. He toyed with the idea of volunteering for the front in the event that he failed his entrance exam, for which he was now preparing furiously; the general had advised him that if he were to engage with the infantry he would have the option of choosing his battalion. Once on the front he would ask to be incorporated into aviation, his first reference to such an aspiration. Around the time that the Armistice was signed he presented himself for the naval exam and indeed failed, but by then there was no longer any war for which he could volunteer. Welcome though the news was, it cast an odd shadow over the Lycée Saint-Louis, to which Saint-Exupéry returned in the fall to prepare for a second try at his entrance exams.

  The Armistice set off a massive series of hijinks in a school already racked by indiscipline; the boys proved so disruptive that Ségogne—who had held elected office as chief instigator—was ultimately expelled. (He was allowed to choose his own successor and passed the mantle to Saint-Exupéry, who wrote joyously of the honor to his mother.) In the pandemonium following the Armistice the students traipsed loudly through the brothels of Paris, with which at least some of them were familiar, opening doors and disrupting business as much as possible. These escapades may have seemed an odd way to celebrate peace, but the return of order was not necessarily welcome news to adolescents who had for four years profited from the distraction of their elders. To Ségogne the chaos represented a natural way to dissemble a grave concern: what were these eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds to do now that they were not in their turn to become the war heroes their older brothers had been? The few years that stood between these boys and their older siblings made a world of difference: not a single member of the Saint-Cyr graduating class of 1914 survived the war. It made a difference, too, so far as one’s literary education went. Saint-Exupéry was locked up in the Lycée Saint-Louis as Hemingway watched pieces of the Madeleine’s façade fall to the ground before him; Dos Passos marveled over fishermen racing to the Seine to scoop up the fish stunned by exploding shells; Joseph Kessel, the French author with whom Saint-Exupéry initially seemed to have the most in common, volunteered in 1916 and flew reconnaissance missions although he was only two years Saint-Exupéry’s elder. These writers would be able to claim the war as their subject. Whether Saint-Exupéry shared Ségogne’s concern—which may in the end have made the risky business of aviation that much more attractive—we do not know. The irony of his having turned nineteen—the conscription age at last—the day after the Treaty of Versailles was signed was not, however, lost on him.

  He continued on at Bossuet that year and into the next, submitting to his exams again the third week of June 1920. He passed his written test—although one of the few autobiographical tall tales he fostered was to pretend that he had received the lowest possible grade on his French composition—but did indeed meet his demise in the oral examination, administered in July in Brest at the naval academy. He was unpredictable enough that timidity or defiance could equally well have cost him the test. Lack of preparation may have had something to do with it as well, despite the long hours he put in at Bossuet and the weeks he had spent in a study of his design on the third floor of Saint-Maurice that summer. Doubtless he felt, before and after the exam, like his golden-haired alter ego: “Grown-ups never question you about the essential.” He was now, after three years of study, too old to submit to the examination a third time.

  There is no record of any particular interest on Saint-Exupéry’s part in a naval career, although as an adolescent he was in general long on pipe dreams and short on professional ambition. “When I’m an engineer, when I earn a lot of money, when I have three cars, we’ll drive together to Constantinople,” was the closest he came, in a 1919 letter to Simone. With his literary ambition he was more explicit. He continued his versifying at Saint-Louis and reported proudly to his mother that his work had met with kudos when he had read it aloud at the Vidals. He felt that he would surely want to write for the theater, having been inspired by the plays of Henry Bataille and Henry Bernstein, and having realized how much raw emotion could be condensed in the form. There are diplomas in France for many things—today there are four for laundry workers—and there are diplomas appropriate to writers, but a young, fatherless man named de Saint-Exupéry, even one who saw the arabesques of an art edition in the formulae of his math workbook, would not have been an obvious candidate for such a degree in 1920. He had set out to do what was expected of him and had foiled these plans, which he carried out as chaotically as possible. In the end he distinguished himself at Saint-Louis by winning a citation for drawing, an honor akin to winning the poetry prize at Cal Tech. He had missed the boat, in more ways than one. France’s educational system is not a forgiving one; a perfect meritocracy, it has no need to offer third and fourth chances. The ex–naval candidate was now without prospects. On some level Saint-Exupéry must have known this. He was so aggravated by his failure that he succumbed to a crise de foie, from which he spent three weeks of the summer recuperating at Vichy.

  The fall of 1920 found him back in Paris. His only source of funds was his mother, who was as accommodating as she could afford to be. Her son enrolled as an auditor at the École des Beaux-Arts, in architecture. He was more regularly to be found, however, down the rue Bonaparte a few steps, at the corner of the Quai Malaquais, not at a drafting but at a café table.

  * Today, one-half the chairmen of the 200 largest companies in France are graduates of either the École Polytechnique or the supreme École Nationale d’Administration.

  V

  ~

  Silver Linings

  1920–1922

  I am like the king of a rainy country, rich but powerless, young, yet already old.

  BAUDELAIRE, Les Fleurs du Mal

  Paris enjoyed a new lea
se on life in 1920, but it was an expensive one. The social whirl picked up where it had left off six years before—some circles had only been temporarily displaced to the provinces—and giggling and screaming les années folles were ushered in. That summer Ezra Pound and James Joyce both moved to Paris; they prowled the same Saint-Germain streets as did the Beaux-Arts student, streets that fairly buzzed with literary activity, expatriate and native. The lightness of relief filled the air, but in some ways life was more difficult than it had been in 1914. France had lost more than 10 percent of her work force in the war; her people complained of what they felt to be an unsatisfactory peace; as she would for the next years, the country began to shudder from political, fiscal, and industrial unrest. Prices had quadrupled since the beginning of the war and continued to rise; the baguette that had cost fifty centimes in December 1919 cost ninety centimes a month later. Madame de Saint-Exupéry did what she could to help her son, now living on his own for the first time. She may have been better positioned to do so since the death of Aunt Tricaud in April, but she could not have been substantially better off: Saint-Maurice was both an expensive property to maintain and an unprofitable one to farm. Her son’s resources would by any count have been modest.

  His ambitions, at least so far as architecture was concerned, were equally modest. Bernard Lamotte, the ebullient painter who spent the war years in New York and whose murals once hung over the White House pool, was among the first to welcome Saint-Exupéry to the École des Beaux-Arts. He did not mince words when describing the new student, whom he thought to be about as much an architect as he was a dentist: “He himself must have occasionally wondered what he was doing at Beaux-Arts, because his love of architecture was not exactly overwhelming.” When Lamotte and company left their ateliers for lunch at the neighborhood bistro they found Saint-Exupéry already well-installed at Chez Jarras, busily scribbling away, not in pictures but in words. This behavior made him the butt of a fair number of jokes. When he could not be ridiculed for his ardent devotion to the written word he was teased for other reasons: when it rains you had best bow your head, he was advised, else, given the shape of your nose (“ton nez-en-trompette”), you risk drowning. By now Saint-Exupéry must have been immune to gibes on both of these counts; still, the elfish Lamotte, well-positioned to take inventory of Saint-Exupéry’s life of contrasts, noticed something curious about his friend. “A strange thing: this big man, this gentleman of such impressive size, next to whom I looked like a little boy, had in fact the sensibility of a little girl. It was bizarre; the two didn’t go together. He was very sensitive, kind, and always a bit awkward.”