Saint-exupery: A Biography

by Stacy Schiff

  Saint-Exupéry had probably made his way to the rue de la Chaise for the first time in 1918 or 1919, at the side of Bertrand de Saussine, whose family was closely linked to the Vilmorins. It is possible, too, that Honoré d’Estienne d’Orves, a fellow Saint-Louis student and a cousin to both families, made the introductions. (France is a small country with a big past: the Vilmorins also claimed a cousin of Joan of Arc as part of their family tree.) Louise would have been sixteen or seventeen at the time; her newfound cousin was two years her elder. Saint-Exupéry became a fairly frequent visitor to the house, which makes it difficult to say when exactly the těte-à-tětes and the poetry-making on the third floor gave way to love. It could not have been before the summer of 1922, when Saint-Exupéry, back from Strasbourg, Casablanca, and Avord, was based in Versailles. That summer his thoughts had certainly turned to love. Partly in jest he wrote his mother to help him find a girl like the three Americans he had just met, who enjoyed dancing because it was amusing, and music because it was pretty, and who claimed that the Eiffel Tower was ugly until told otherwise, when in unison they agreed that it was beautiful. “I don’t need her to entertain me with literary theory,” he wrote, regarding his prospective flame.

  That June, under the auspices of Louise, a “société humoristique” called the GB Club—evidently for “Groupe Bossuet”—was founded. Its mission was “to foster among its members the growth of healthy ribaldry.” The names of the founding committee members are familiar enough: Saussine was appointed archivist, Olivier de Vilmorin treasurer, Vassoigne the “frugal bursar.” Saint-Exupéry’s name appears at the end of the list of officers; the Count was given the title “Grand Poète Sentimental et Comique.” The twenty-six bylaws of the club encouraged bawdiness, principally at table, and distinguished the tasteless humor appropriate to a cheese course from the banter appropriate to dessert. All discussion of politics and religion was banned, doubtless for reasons of aesthetics rather than of etiquette. Duels were authorized, scuffles encouraged, boxing and karate rewarded. In some ways the GB Club resembled all such juvenile associations, down to the official colors and the mascot. In other ways it belonged to a unique time and place: among its official suppliers figured not only a brand of cigarettes but of port, apéritif, digestif, and Champagne. (For the last, only certain Roederer and Moët et Chandon labels would do.)

  The by-laws guaranteed a warm reception at the rue de la Chaise for all members, and by the end of the fall the Grand Poète Sentimental et Comique—who was evidently not present on June 20, when the club’s charter was signed—had begun to take this invitation literally. He put his appointment to work on a familiar and arduous brand of courtship, the same kind he had used on his childhood interests, Odette de Sinéty, the mysterious beauty of Fribourg, and Jeanne de Menthon. This time he had a more appreciative victim. Few young women could have been as inspiring to a poet as was Louise de Vilmorin, and few would have so appreciated that poet’s efforts than one who herself effortlessly constructed verse and recited whole libraries by heart. Louise charmed Saint-Exupéry with her fantastic stories; he courted her with sonnets.

  They were both of them creatures of whimsy. Louise de Vilmorin was the issue of the same brand of enchanted-garden childhood as was Saint-Exupéry: in her sixties she was said by an admirer to remain still entirely attached to the magic of her childhood. Hers had in part taken place twelve miles southwest of Paris, at Verrières-le-Buisson, in a house with a romantic past of its own. It had been built by Louis XIV in 1680 for another Louise: Mademoiselle de La Vallière lost the King (to Madame de Maintenon) but got the house. What was more, Louise de Vilmorin’s education had been blessedly free of such burdens as math, science, Latin, or Greek. She had been raised on a steady diet of letters. Two years before Saint-Exupéry arrived on the scene, her mother had chastised her for her dreaminess, which she thought made her daughter less attractive to men, a subject on which Madame de Vilmorin’s expertise was unquestionable. “You spend your days writing trivial things and looking out the window at what happens in the street.… Men don’t like that.” Louise’s “trivialities” were poems or stories. She was known to begin: “The queen of Italy had a cat which was unusual in that it was a ghost-cat,” or “There was once a man who married a huge bureau, in each drawer of which was a child.” She played the cello, she painted, she doodled. It would have been difficult to imagine a more appropriate Countess de Saint-Exupéry.

  Louise’s room, like Captain Priou’s or the Saussines’ salons, was the kind of place in which Saint-Exupéry shone. His radiance was not lost on Louise, for whom he composed a great flurry—some say a formal volume—of poems, the bulk of which she seemed to lose. Twenty-two years later, in a statement as revealing of her voice as her suitor’s charms, she described him: “The magician of our adolescence. A minstrel, a knight, a noble magus, a child of mystery, full of grace. Merry and serious, he distributed throughout our quarters—which were entirely those of the time—the customs, the accent, the virtues, the speech, of a province which might have been a neighboring one, but which appeared nowhere on our maps of the world.” For a girl who claimed, with reason, that she was not of this world, who struck a friend later as “a tamed sprite who led you, almost illicitly, into a surreal world,” it was a perfect match.

  It was also an advantageous one. Louise de Vilmorin would have seemed an attractive catch for any man, not least of all an impoverished aristocrat. Her fortune could not have been of less importance to Saint-Exupéry; his lack of fortune was of great concern to the Vilmorins. Perversely, he could not have bothered with a marriage of convenience, although he knew he was expected to (as he put it in a 1928 letter to Louise, “They wanted to marry me off, they wanted me to marry some heiress and lead a peaceful, comfortable life”), and Louise de Vilmorin turned out to be hugely inconvenient. In the fall of 1922, when he had made his intentions known, he was living in an inexpensive hotel in the 12th arrondissement. He was flying at Villacoublay and at Le Bourget, piloting a Nieuport 29 with great delight, offering aerial baptisms to his friends, who obliged him by turning all shades of green. That was the extent of his professional life. His social rounds continued unabated: he saw the Bonnevies, the Vidals, Ségogne, his aunt Anaïs, the Jourdans, and Abbé Sudour. If he wrote of the early days of the relationship with Louise to his mother, whose opinion on all else carried such weight, the letters in which he did so have not been preserved; the first mention of his fiancée dates from 1923. It is almost certain, however, that in late 1922 his mother sent or carried to Paris an heirloom string of pearls intended as an engagement present for Louise. It did not measure up to Vilmorin standards—Louise sent the pearls out to be restrung, at her own expense, although a misunderstanding on the jeweler’s part resulted in Saint-Exupéry’s being sent the bill—and constituted an additional strike against a suitor whom Madame de Vilmorin already found less than satisfactory. “If Louise loved him,” wrote her brother André, “the same was not true of our mother, who barely understood his conversation, found him boring, and expected a more brilliant match for her daughter.” The doting Vilmorin brothers might not have shared all of these concerns—they must have been more susceptible to Saint-Exupéry’s magic—but it was difficult under any circumstances to endorse the choice of an aviator husband. Marrying a pilot was tantamount to putting in a claim on early widowhood, reasoned the Vilmorins, who were not alone in thinking the brash young man “le condamné à mort.” Saint-Exupéry surely knew of these objections, but any arguments he may have made on his own behalf would have been seriously undermined on May 1, 1923, when the laws of nature betrayed him.

  According to air force files, Saint-Exupéry took up a fellow second-lieutenant in a Hanriot HD14 that Tuesday morning at Le Bourget, presumably for a holiday joyride. The Hanriot was not an aircraft he was qualified to fly—he was authorized to pilot Caudron 59’s—and the plane crashed to earth in a spin from a height of about three hundred feet within a minute of leaving the runway. Saint-
Exupéry’s passenger, Lieutenant Richaux, suffered a fractured skull; Saint-Exupéry was badly bruised all over, enough so that he would be bothered later by complications of his injuries. He had been entirely at fault; the mangled remains of the aircraft indicated that he had made some crucial mistakes at the controls. At the Hospital Villemin in Paris he found that, though badly shaken up and a little numb, he was alive. “I beg your forgiveness for having complained so much, but take my word for it without attempting the exercise: falling from 270 feet on your head makes you extraordinarily touchy and irritable,” he wrote his mother. His sense of humor had not deserted him: he asked that she forward to him any tearful letters she might receive from the family.

  He had plenty of visitors, first among them Henry de Ségogne, who was listed as the person to be contacted in case of accident and who appears to have spent most of the next ten days at the side of his friend’s hospital bed. Saint-Exupéry reported that he had given the little lecture on his fall so many times that he had memorized the speech and forgotten the crash; it was a narrative technique with which he was to have a good deal of practice. Charles Sallès read in the papers that a “lieutenant Saint-Escupéry” had had a bad accident at Le Bourget, realized instantly that it was his airplane-obsessed Fribourg friend, and met him on his release from the hospital. Only the pilot’s sisters remained oddly out of touch; as demanding post-fracture as he had been earlier, Saint-Exupéry wrote his mother that he did not forgive them their silence.

  The official reaction to his close call was not exactly a damning one, despite the fact that the pilot was temporarily grounded for “his too-lively interest in trying all types of planes.” There are smart and less smart ways to crash-land; today, learning the difference between the two makes up a significant part of a student pilot’s education. “Made to be a fighter pilot. Excellent flyer. Inspired,” applauded the official report. He was assigned fifteen days of the lightest possible punishment. The reaction to the mishap turned out to be less forgiving than the reaction to the misdemeanor: Louise de Vilmorin sent her sister, Marie-Pierre, to Saint-Exupéry’s bedside to announce that Louise could not possibly tolerate a life of such close calls. On her sister’s behalf, she demanded that he give up flying. The man who had fallen to earth was head over heels in love. After he had left the hospital but before he was entirely recovered he had agreed to do so.

  ~

  The accident took no toll on Saint-Exupéry’s spirits. He installed himself with cousins on the rue de Verneuil and continued on his social rounds, where he could not have wanted for attention. We do not know if he flew again that spring but he ultimately made good on his promise to Louise. On June 5, he was officially released from the military, having served his two years. As a reserve officer his only peacetime obligation to the armed services was to report to Villacoublay or Orly for annual two-week training sessions over the next years, a commitment to which he doubtless looked forward. A letter sent shortly after the accident allows a glimpse of his priorities: he reported on the one hand that his writing had continued apace and that he might have a story published by the NRF, on the other that “There is nothing new in my life because I am spending my days, quietly and sweetly, with Loulou.”

  All was not entirely well in paradise, however, beginning with Saint-Exupéry’s health. Sometime in the summer of 1923 he checked into a clinic at Vichy as a result of the accident. In addition to the usual hydrotherapy, his treatment at the Villa des Acarins consisted, at least at the outset, of a certain amount of movie- and theater-going, story-writing, and chocolate-tasting. (The last could not have been of much help to his liver, which was evidently swollen.) He and Louise had by now settled on a late October or early November wedding, and this resolution seemed to have triggered a volley of objections from the Vilmorin front. The holdout was Louise’s mother, although the Vilmorin boys—later referred to as Louise’s “general staff of brothers”—did not help. They noticed Saint-Exupéry’s appealing sturdiness—a build the French call “style armoire à glace” (politely, “a hulking brute”)—less than his awkwardness, and took to calling him the “vague pachyderm.” Behind the scenes an uncle of Louise’s agreed that if the hand-wringing continued he would personally accompany the bride to the altar. He assured the young couple that arrangements could be made for the two to marry without Madame de Vilmorin’s consent, if necessary. A Vilmorin family friend, Charles Daniel-Vincent, a former and future Minister of Labor and a decorated World War I aviator, promised to help find Saint-Exupéry a job, but the promise remained an abstract one for some time. Madame de Saint-Exupéry was still funding her son’s life; the groom-to-be suddenly began to sound contrite on this subject. He suffered from his separation from Louise, more so after his doctor unexpectedly extended his treatment, concerned about the state of his liver. He had other worries as well: in light of his upcoming nuptials and what he believed to have been true of his father he arranged to be tested for syphilis, the first of many times he would do so. His fear proved entirely unfounded.

  It began to get hot in Vichy, which did nothing either for Saint-Exupéry’s spirits or his intellect. He felt his wits lagging and claimed he was incapable of so much as a simple pun; he no longer had the energy even to go to the theater. He had no interest in the races at Vichy. He drank and napped and dreamed, poor occupations under his circumstances; he thought only of Louise. “I’ve been trying to write a story,” he wrote his mother. “So far it consists only of one line. And that’s just the title. And it isn’t even original; it’s called ‘Story.’ ”

  Late in August the lovers were reunited far from all the concerns their engagement had provoked. Louise had gone to Switzerland with her governess, Mademoiselle Petermann, to recover from a bad cold. In Reconvilier, in the Jura Mountains, Saint-Exupéry joined her. He sold his Kodak in order to make the trip, which was partially financed by his mother as well. Louise wrote of her gratitude for this largesse to Madame de Saint-Exupéry; the two began to dispatch joint letters to Saint-Maurice, often finishing each other’s sentences. The cooing and giggling fairly bounce off the page; at the end of one letter Louise complained, veering toward illegibility, that Saint-Exupéry was kissing her so much she could no longer hold the pen. They were happy—Louise assured Madame de Saint-Exupéry that she owed her the happiest days of her life—and in a dreamworld of their own, or at least dreamworlds of their own. As Louise described it, her fiancé the ex-pilot often thought only of aviation: “He describes for me terrifying or sublime moments spent between the sky and the earth, and I, who can think only of furnishing our future home, interrupt him to ask if he likes well-padded chairs.”

  Other moments of the Swiss idyll were more auspicious. At one point the two escaped from Mademoiselle Petermann, who must have found chaperoning the couple exhausting. Louise re-created the scene years later:

  Secretly, we manage an escape. For a few pennies, we take a little train; in sitting down I am careful not to wrinkle my skirt, I take off my white cotton gloves, and while he watches the birds, the clouds, the celestial currents, I survey the chalets, their starched curtains, the little gardens, and the plants on the embankment. Then, lost in each other’s eyes, we trade observations until our arrival in Bienne. The sky is gray, the lake is dulled by black reflections, the day is ominous, and we are cold under the trees. “To warm ourselves, let’s buy some chocolates, and smoke a cigarette or two; let’s go sit in the train station where the posters are so pretty,” he suggests. Couples who are about to separate do not hesitate to kiss in train stations. The whistle of the trains gives the signal to embrace and the lovers, about to leave each other, huddle in each other’s arms. Well aware that we are cheating, we do the same.

  The two returned to France at the end of the month via Geneva, where the state of their amorous (or natural) distraction was well-displayed. At the sound of military music that afternoon in the Swiss city Saint-Exupéry leaped from the lakeside lunch table, pulling Louise along with him. “Like all the yo
uth born before the war of 1914, we were patriotic,” explained Louise, who followed her fiancé through the streets in a daze, dreaming of the French flag, the indignities of the war, the tribulations of Alsace-Lorraine, finally bursting into tears as the music swept over her. Through her sobs she shouted, “Vive la France!” only to discover a Swiss flag waving before her. A Geneva regiment was returning from maneuvers in the field.

  Back in Paris, at Louise’s suggestion, Saint-Exupéry set about reminding Daniel-Vincent about the position he had promised. It was not the kind of persistence at which he excelled; if he undertook this self-promotion now at the insistence of his fiancée he would later entrust these kinds of entreaties as much as possible to women. It is said often enough that there is a woman behind every moment in French history; Saint-Exupéry’s very masculine career was, both by default and concentrated effort, often directed by the women in his life. (“My wife’s opinion is an invaluable thing,” he wrote this fall, his only bald statement on the subject, to his mother.) Daniel-Vincent’s devotion to the Vilmorin family paid off—after a number of what Saint-Exupéry politely referred to as “diplomatic calls”—in a position as a production supervisor at the Tuileries Boiron, at 56, rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré. He was to occupy himself with bookkeeping tasks, for which effort he earned 800 francs a month, not enough, unfortunately, to make his maternal petitions a thing of the past.

  “The practical side of my life is not yet organized,” he wrote his mother in a great display of understatement, probably in late September. His office was not far from the place de la Concorde, and the hotels in the heart of Paris were unaffordable on his budget; he stayed in one for a few weeks as an aunt tried to help him arrange an alternative. He was eager for the marriage and found the Vilmorins less disapproving; they had even led him to hope that they might put him up on their return to Paris the following month. Yet the financial problem remained a nagging one. He had borrowed money from family friends, who now balked a little at his requests. He signed a letter to his mother, “Your impoverished son, who has only 3F20 to his name,” assuring her that he was living as economically as possible. This was a little untrue. While he was no longer flying he was eating well at the time, and probably displaying his congenital inability to let anyone else pick up the check. He still owed Le Bourget 190 francs from his accident and because of this did not dare see any of his pilot friends. He was lonely, too, as a good number of his other friends, and his fiancée, were still out of town for the summer.