by Stacy Schiff
By the time Saint-Exupéry boarded the boat back to France, in February 1922, nostalgia had begun to mist the air. “I can’t complain about Morocco, it was good to me,” he wrote from the boat. “I spent days of terrible depression in a rotten barrack”—earlier he had written his sister that mushrooms were sprouting both on his body and his brain—“but I remember it now as a life full of poetry.” He was turning cartwheels in his mind as he crossed the Mediterranean from Tangier to Marseilles, commanding his mother to kill the fatted calf and heat his room well, challenging the curé to chess, sending hugs on to his governess, entreating Simone not to mention his return to the Bonnevies, so that he might surprise Louis. All’s well that ends well: the ex–naval candidate discovered at this time that he was prone to seasickness.
~
The return to Saint-Maurice was to wait a little longer—probably, Saint-Exupéry thought, until late in the month. From Marseilles he made the short trip north to Istres, having passed his reserve officer training exam. This he did despite himself; he told a friend that he had gone to great pains to fail the exam, but had been held back by a certain sense of propriety from pushing this scheme too far. Probably he was held back as well by memories of his aborted naval career. He could at least congratulate himself on not having passed with flying colors: while only one in twelve applicants passed the exam, Saint-Exupéry distinguished himself by ranking sixty-eighth out of the victorious sixty-nine. (He was also the only qualifying student officer à la particule.) On the last day of January he received his pilot’s license and on February 5 he was promoted to corporal. Two months later he was assigned to the airfield at Avord, outside Bourges, in central France, the field that had served as the primary training ground for World War I pilots. He did not resign at this time as he had warned he might; it is tempting to think he had begun to enjoy himself a little.
Jean Escot, a Lyons native who had remembered Saint-Exupéry’s extraordinary triumph over the rules at Strasbourg and who would remain a fixture in his life over the next twenty years, recalled the comic figure the pilot cut on his arrival in Avord: “Pants too large, coat sleeves too short, indescribable leggings, regulation hat sprouting giant wings.” The fault was not entirely that of Saint-Exupéry, who had in fact got his choice at the commissary; the air force was still so new that its uniforms were somewhat improvisational. When Saint-Exupéry earned his second-lieutenant’s kepi that fall, there was still no regulation-issue headgear and he was given his choice of colors. (Only that year did the Ministry of War recognize the air force as a military branch on a par with the cavalry or infantry; it would not have its own ministry for another six years or its independence for eleven.) In October as in April Saint-Exupéry wore khaki; only the officers who had trained in metropolitan France had a right to regulation light blue. This, too, set him apart. He actively cultivated his reputation as an eccentric. When asked about his prior schooling he replied that he had come from Beaux-Arts, which was roughly akin to arriving at divinity school and claiming to have come by way of ROTC. When word got around that he had failed his oral exams for the naval academy he offered this explanation: “I didn’t like the looks of the examiner. So I answered whatever I felt like!” His ability to attain, as one friend later termed it, “a surprising density of occupation of a room” did not go unnoticed any more than did his sartorial disarray. He reveled in his untidiness, writing his mother that summer:
I am writing from my little room. An intimate and comforting disorder reigns. My books, my stove, my chessboard, my inkpot, and my toothbrush crowd around me on the table. I survey my kingdom in a long glance; my subjects do not run to cower in the drawers. Would you like a chocolate bar? Wait, here is one, between my compass and my bottle of methyl alcohol. Would you like a pen? Look over there in the basin.
He was in his element, although it was hardly a soldierly one. Even while he did astonishingly well on his exams, he did not conform to a military profile. As he had at Strasbourg he continued to write and to draw. He remained an incorrigible caricaturist. He performed technical experiments with his camera. One classmate remembered Saint-Exupéry drilling him—over the course of four hours—about the functioning of a metallurgical plant, with which he was familiar. As he illustrated the process, Saint-Exupéry, avidly following the explanation, embellished his diagrams with drawings of mischievous devils and nervous angels. He proved equally enchanted by the experiments an unusual classmate named Larrouy performed with hypnosis and made Escot one of his first victims, although his attempts to put him under were largely unsuccessful. Not so the card tricks he had been taught in the Strasbourg barracks: In the 1930s and early 1940s he met a great number of people who would remember nothing about Saint-Exupéry except that he was very tall, very famous, and could do sensational things with a pack of cards. In general he proved a far more outgoing colleague at Avord than he had earlier, although his taste for human contact could also be wearing. Escot remembered interminable discussions the two had as they traveled together to Lyons on leave. These were in fact soliloquies: Escot’s compartment mate was inexhaustible on the subjects of Dostoyevsky, Baudelaire, Cocteau, and Giraudoux.
Escot and Saint-Exupéry were more effectively drawn together by a common problem. The Avord training was for an observer’s license, which all aspiring officers needed to obtain. The curriculum consisted mainly of classroom work, with some flying as an observer; there was no scheduled piloting, and in fact only seven members of the class had earned pilot’s licenses. The schedule was a full one—after their courses in navigation, meteorology, and bombardment the young men went up in Salmsons or Breguet 14’s as passengers—but the Avord officers-in-training were allowed to rack up hours on the Sopwiths before the day’s classes began, usually between 6:00 and 8:00 a.m. Escot swore he had never met anyone who was so much a fanatic about flying as Saint-Exupéry, whose sleeping habits seemed to corroborate the claim. He was notoriously difficult to rouse, but when it came to flying he was up and about and tugging at Escot’s sleeve at dawn.
He was less eager—and less talented—as a student observer. His mishaps were legendary, and began with his colleagues having to shame him from his bed, then rearrange his uniform for roll call. Quickly he developed a reputation for being incorrigibly absentminded, a description that now began to trail him wherever he went.
In his letters he vacillated between a dawning independence and a clinging immaturity. He was angry with his mother when she did not write and could be severe with her, chastising her for shutting herself up in her “feudal Saint-Maurice.” There is plenty of evidence that this treatment was reciprocal. At the same time Saint-Exupéry had not gained any appreciation for military discipline, or classes in tactics, or the humorlessness of his officers, and wrote that he fended off the dryness of military life by imagining his mother arranging flowers in the drawing room of Saint-Maurice. He felt her to be the antidote to the harshness of his superiors as she had been to the harshness of the pères préfets of his schooldays. Over and over again he wrote that he felt like a little boy, in need of a little boy’s comforts. With joy he announced, happy for once with his fate, that he would soon begin training as a second lieutenant and would thenceforth receive a monthly 1,000-franc stipend. “Then I will marry, I will have a little apartment, a cook, and a delightful wife,” he predicted. Without missing a beat he went on to tell his mother that the Avord tailor was a “hard and bitter man” who was, by damning insinuation, pestering him to pay his overdue bill. Could she send him 200 francs immediately?
Among his classmates these wire orders were as well-known as was Saint-Exupéry’s seigneurial ignorance about money. He often made the trip to Paris on Sunday; if his mother’s telegram did not arrive on time to fund the outing he had no qualms about soliciting contributions from his classmates. (He was obliged because he scrupulously repaid all debts. Later his literary agent in America, a frequent and generous lender of money, reported that Saint-Exupéry was the only author who ever rei
mbursed him.) In June the group spent two weeks at a special training camp at Mailly, from which Saint-Exupéry absented himself for a weekend when his cousin Guy was married in Paris. He clearly did so at his mother’s request, and either suddenly realized how bedraggled he looked or thought the event a good excuse for another solicitation. He went to lengths to make Madame de Saint-Exupéry understand that she could not, under the circumstances, begrudge him his requests for funds; he could not be expected to make a threadbare appearance at a wedding. The month before his 1,000-franc stipend was to begin he lobbied for a 300-franc wire, although his mother had clearly been angry with him about these requests, which had been directed at his Paris relatives as well. Brusquely he repeated his demands, begging her not to be angry with him, and assuring her that he was more serious than nine out often of his comrades. He omitted to say that he had more expensive habits as well.
In August the student officers moved to Versailles for two months, to be trained in the various components of land war. The usual question presented itself to Escot and Saint-Exupéry: how to fly? Courses were held only in the mornings; the fanatics were advised that they were welcome to pilot so long as they made their own arrangements and were in their seats for the 9:00 a.m. lecture. Villacoublay, one of the early centers of French aviation, was only four miles away, and the two quickly arranged for Escot’s brother to send the Escot brothers’ jointly owned motorcycle from London. A small fortune—some of it doubtless originating in Saint-Maurice—made its way into the hands of the Saint-Lazare customs inspectors, but with the cycle in their possession the two were able to set out every morning at their leisure. At Villacoublay they presented themselves at the first hangar, in which gleamed a series of brand-new Caudron C59’s. Escot’s logbook was more impressive than that of Saint-Exupéry, who was warned that this fighter plane was faster than the Sopwiths to which he was accustomed. Both pilots performed two control circuits and then flew for a half hour, by Escot’s report laughing to themselves the whole time. They were told they were welcome to come back every morning, weather permitting. Escot turned toward the motorcycle but Saint-Exupéry did not: another hangar, filled with Breguet 14’s, had caught his eye. Soon enough the officers-in-training had completed a second set of introductions and control circuits, and were aloft for a second half hour. Thus, greedily, over the course of the next months, they built up flying hours. To his mother Saint-Exupéry wrote only that he was flying daily and was happy as a clam.
From Versailles he began to slip into Paris every evening, occasionally with Escot. He finished his training early in October 1922 and on the tenth was named a second lieutenant. As he was in the top half of the class*—it is important to all that came later that in the eyes of his air force superiors, who made no official mention of his distraction, Saint-Exupéry was a technically proficient and a promising pilot—he was allowed to choose his next posting. Probably he did not hesitate before requesting Paris. (Escot opted for Lyons, and would lose sight of his friend for two years, until a chance encounter on a Paris street reunited them. Both men’s second choice was Morocco, a testament to the power of nostalgia on Saint-Exupéry’s part.) He was assigned to the 34th Air Regiment, based at Paris’s principal airport, Le Bourget, where Lindbergh would land five years later. Saint-Exupéry’s responsibilities as a reserve officer were not taxing: he was to show up early each day at the airfield, and to fly a few times weekly.
To the site of his Beaux-Arts dabblings and his Bossuet disappointments he returned a happier soul. After his eighteen months with the army he was no more disciplined—these were years when one could be an iconoclast in the air force, when most of the French military still had trouble taking a so-called officer who had not survived the ordeals of Saint-Cyr or Saumur seriously—and disobedience remained for him the better part of valor. Nor was he, at twenty-two, any more responsible than he had been a year and a half earlier. But his idle years had allowed him a chance to cement a few important friendships, and he had emerged from under the cloud of his earlier failures. He had “delicious” friends and an enduring passion. While the Armistice had put a damper on one kind of future, the war had also offered up a new profession; Saint-Exupéry had turned his military service to his advantage. If he was still living in the present, he was at least no longer a precocious nostalgic, stuck in the past. His ambition loping along, he even began to think a little about the future. Or at least to dream about it: sometime late in the summer of 1922 he fell head over heels in love.
* In fact the population of Lyons was at the time more than three times larger than that of Strasbourg.
* He ranked twenty-seventh of sixty-two.
VI
~
Walking on Air
1922–1926
The purpose of the aristocrat is most emphatically not to work for money.
NANCY MITFORD, Noblesse Oblige
The object of Saint-Exupéry’s affection came as no surprise to his friends, most of whom lived under the same thrall. The surprise more likely came in the fact that the young officer’s affections were reciprocated. He was by no measure the most attractive of Louise de Vilmorin’s suitors, into which category fell nearly every man who mounted the three flights to her room at the top of an imposing hôtel particulier on the rue de la Chaise. It was a crowded staircase. In the salons below, Madame de Vilmorin, a lively, dark-haired beauty, entertained a wide circle of politicians and ministers of the Republic: Édouard Herriot, Paul Painlevé, and Léon Bérard were frequent callers. Her husband—a geneticist under whom the family agricultural business had thrived—had died in Louise’s youth; he had been a great friend of the dramatists Sacha Guitry and Paul Claudel. Madame de Vilmorin was absorbed enough in her conversations and indulgent enough as a parent to pay little attention to the army of visitors that descended upon her four sons and two daughters; the house itself was rambling and baroque, easily accommodating a great number of comings and goings, more or less discreetly. The flow of traffic—and secrets and telephone calls and billets-doux—was further assisted by the complicitous concierge, Léon Hubert, who took special care of the Vilmorin children. It was a festive and feted household and a hugely popular one, perfumed as it was with a whiff of decadence. So much of the École Bossuet found its way to 1, rue de la Chaise during the late-afternoon break that the abbé who ran the school was forced to inquire: “I wonder what there is chez Madame de Vilmorin which causes all these boys to rush over there all the time?”
Henry de Ségogne could have answered the question admirably:
At the very top of the Vilmorins’ townhouse, in a room which was a roost, an exquisite room, admirably appointed, there was, in a bed, the most exquisite creature imaginable, the quintessential young lady, in a light pink nightshirt, smoking Craven A’s; she was poetry itself, poetry incarnate, charm incarnate; the small face of this creature was something from a dream, a waking dream, it was a marvelous vision, further enhanced by an entirely irresistible chirping. She was highly intelligent, entirely precious, she was absolutely stunning.
At no point in her life was Louise de Vilmorin a woman who evoked modest tributes. The youngest of the Vilmorins, known to her intimates as Loulou, suffered from a hip ailment that confined her to a cast and to her bed for nearly three years in the early 1920s. This allowed her to receive visitors in a somewhat unorthodox fashion, often said to be daringly unorthodox. It partially explained her four older brothers’ tendency to dote on her; it encouraged the dreaminess to which all convalescents to some degree succumb; and it left her with a slight limp, which she turned into a supplementary charm later in life. In Saint-Exupéry’s eyes the handicap transformed a perfect auburn-haired, pale-skinned, turquoise-eyed beauty into what he would most have liked to find ensconced at the top of a tower: a fairy princess.