by Stacy Schiff
His situation improved a little in the fall. On October 24 he moved to the Hôtel Titania on the boulevard Ornano, one of Paris’s less chic addresses. The 18th arrondissement is about as far from the rue de la Chaise or the quai Malaquais as one can get, but it was affordable, and for the next eleven months the Titania provided Saint-Exupéry with a Paris address. He started out with a room on the sixth floor, the tiny balcony of which offered a view of Montmartre and Sacré-Coeur. He was disgusted with these lodgings—as much as he always maintained a distance from the material world his appreciation for comfort never lapsed—although his discontent did not prevent him from prevailing upon Jean Escot to move to the same address when the two ran into each other on the street this winter. Escot was at the time comfortably installed in a furnished room near the École Militaire; he proved as incapable as ever of resisting Saint-Exupéry’s will. (This was, after all, the friend who, given a shortage of aircraft, argued, “Let me go first, you know it certainly matters more to me than to you!” and who, before a serving of caviar, bargained, “Leave me the bigger portion, you know I like it more than you do!”) Shortly after Escot’s arrival Saint-Exupéry managed to flood his room—he may have been perfecting the technique he would use later at Yvonne de Lestrange’s—and was resettled in more luxurious quarters on the fourth floor. These soon disappeared under the detritus of his life. He wrote his mother that she would have to come and live with him when he was rich; as things stood he hadn’t the courage to separate his shirt collars from his socks.
He also wrote her in the fall with the happy news that he was very close to getting a new job, this one in the automotive industry. “It will be my first joy in a year,” wrote the man who had astutely pointed out elsewhere that no two joys resemble each other. This was a different kind of pleasure from the one he had anticipated the previous autumn, but it was consolation of a kind. He was rescued from his bookkeeping by the Saurer truck company, which hired him in October as a traveling salesman at what seemed to Saint-Exupéry the munificent salary of 12,000 francs yearly, an annual commission of about 25,000 francs, and a company car. The position began with a three-month training period (Saint-Exupéry mistakenly thought it two months long) at a salary more in keeping with his Boiron wage. Decked out in a pair of blue workman’s overalls, he learned, piece by greasy piece, the secrets of a truck engine. Proudly he reported to Sallès that he felt capable of disassembling his friend’s Citroën single-handedly. This was the kind of engineering school at which Saint-Exupéry excelled, although it was not the kind of engineering school the privileged generally attended. French news magazines can today eke out cover stories on the number of aristocrats working for the Parisian transit authority, a still-fascinating subject, but in the 1920s a count in overalls was an unusual sight. Of all the ill-fitting uniforms Saint-Exupéry wore in his life, none was more inappropriate than the workman’s blues with which he now claimed to be enchanted. The language of the mechanics charmed him too with its earthiness; he found the fast wit of the garage irresistible. “Je me porte,” he wrote home, “comme le Pont-Neuf” (“I’m a new man”).
He was no longer bored, but exhausted. The Saurer plant was located in Suresnes, now a western suburb of Paris, at the time a good hour and a half from the Titania doorstep. When the hotel porter and Escot succeeded in their herculean efforts, Saint-Exupéry awoke between 5:30 and 6:00 so as to travel across the Bois de Boulogne to Suresnes as the winter sun began to rise. Between the work and the commute thirteen hours of his day were spoken for, which left him the time to have dinner and the time to delay Escot’s night’s sleep but not the energy to write. It was not exactly a life of letters—he complained he no longer read or wrote—but he was, oddly, in his element. It was his first taste of working with his hands, on a team, in an unacademic setting, and he relished it. The joys of vocational school did not change him entirely: He continued to rent an airplane at Orly on Sundays when he could afford to and doubtless as well when he could not. He often enough defied all efforts to rouse him and had to race to Suresnes in a taxi, a trip that could put a dent in any budget. He lobbied for a significant sum to “refaire son trousseau,” a somewhat literal plea as he had not had a new suit since his discharge from the army.
Early in the winter of 1925 he traded his overalls for a suit and made a two-week tour of northern France with a colleague who was to teach him the art of the traveling salesman. Afterward he was dispatched to Montluçon, the headquarters from which he was to cover three departments of central France: the Creuse, the Cher, and the Allier. These first few weeks as a traveling salesman were for Saint-Exupéry giddy ones. Although he did not yet have a car and was at first forced to travel by train he was solvent, employed, independent, mobile. For the next months he rarely spent two consecutive nights in the same place, moving from hotel to hotel, café to café, racing back to Paris whenever his schedule permitted. In such a way he made the close acquaintance of the third-rate hotels to which Jacques Bernis applied with Geneviève, the kind with “special rates for traveling salesmen.” On the road, save for a visit by Henry de Ségogne and a number of excursions he made with Charles Sallès in Sallès’s 5CV—excursions that generally kept the duo out until dawn—he was alone. It was an existence he described, with jubilation and frustration, as an exile, “une cure de silence,” that of a pilgrim, the wandering Jew. It was, down to the poste restante Montluçon address, all of it a rehearsal for another life.
Saint-Exupéry was a man who needed an audience, and it was his friends and family who kept him afloat, as much when he was in Paris as on the road. The letters he dispatched during the Saurer year have few rivals and constitute early proof that—as he was to argue as loudly as any writer of our century—a writer is well off employed. Their letterheads provide a stylish map of the itinerant year: he wrote on elaborate Beaux-Arts stationery from the Hotel Aucouturier in Boussac, from the Grand Hôtel du Boeuf in Vierzon, from the office of a mechanic in Monteil-au-Vicomte, from a café-restaurant in Bourges. He prepared his friends and family well for the flurry of letters they would ultimately receive from Port-Étienne, Dakar, Buenos Aires, Punta Arenas; through his eyes the Saurer rounds became themselves a kind of tour du monde. These letters begin to reveal that he lived to a different rhythm. He occasionally overcame his lifelong aversion to dating his correspondence—something of a statement in a culture in which it is as customary to date a letter as to sign one—during this year on the road, when time did not exactly fly. “The I-haven’t-the-foggiest-idea,” he began one later. “Midnight sharp, is it tomorrow or yesterday?” he dated another. “The twentieth century,” he marked a note to Escot in which he sketched portions of the three legs of his journey from Paris to Vierzon, the last leg of which is illustrated by a fat black square, “because it was nighttime.”
In a letter dated “the day after yesterday,” he reported on a meeting with a potential client who had put him off with the promise of buying a truck at a future date. “I don’t give a damn about later; I will already have died of hunger,” grumbled Saint-Exupéry, who included in this lavishly illustrated letter a prototype of the Little Prince’s tippler, meant to illustrate the commercial traveler at rest. Escot’s missives in particular very nearly resemble comic strips: Saint-Exupéry illustrated his toothache, and the main street of Bourges; he provided a sketch of himself in bed (in an uncharacteristic lapse of imagination he indicated the position of his guardian angel but claimed he could not draw her). He provided a little bar graph of how the traveling salesman spent his time, the bulk of which was devoted to putting people back in their places, the smallest fraction of which to interesting reading.
Life in the provinces left something to be desired in the eyes of this ex-provincial, who turned to it both a caricaturist’s eye and an anthropologist’s ear. For Escot he drew the symbols of provincial life (a calendar draped in spider webs) and of Parisian life (a speedometer powered by a 300-horsepower engine, held in place by a naked woman). An illust
ration of a Bourges café shows an empty room and is marked “The annual client has just left.” He had a little irreverence meter that went off whenever he encountered the self-important or the self-satisfied, and it rang a good deal this year. He confided to Sallès his terror of defacing the ornate stationery of the Café Riche: “What a responsibility to write on this paper! It comes from the most important café in Montluçon, what presumption on my part!” He was taken with the accents, the mores, the foibles of la France profonde and described to Sallès a Montluçon “full of little shopkeepers who travel twenty yards in their lives. The grocer, the fruit vendor, the undertaker all fit in a tiny space. Existence can amount to such a short trip.” This was his first close encounter with the life of the petite bourgeoisie—what some might call the real world—and it was an eye-opener.
He could be charmed, too, by the quaintness of provincial France, as he was by a dance he and Sallès attended. They had thought a Montluçon gathering would be great fun but arrived to find no bar, no cocktails, no jazz. At the “sous-préfet’s ball” one waltzed, under the protective eyes of the girls’ mothers, who lined the four walls of the room, surveying the proceedings like a jury. This “old guard” chatted pleasantly among itself while their daughters twirled away on the dance floor. Their escorts, a group of cyclists, sported stiff dinner jackets reeking of mothballs; they pulled at their sleeves, checked their reflections in the mirrors, tried to make peace with their scratchy, starched collars. On the subject of Argenton-sur-Creuse, a hamlet disturbed only every four hours by the noise of its tiny steam train, Saint-Exupéry was equally rhapsodic. One afternoon he settled on the parapet of the town’s old stone bridge after a walk. “I set my hat down beside me and felt a great sense of freedom. As did my hat—it is at present sailing toward America. I watched it slowly head off, intelligently take a curve, then disappear,” he wrote after watching his Sainte-Croix essay come to life, bewitched as always by objects carried off by the wind. As much as anything else these letters were desperate attempts to amuse himself. Within months of his arrival in Montluçon he admitted to being bored silly: “My life is empty. I get up, I drive, I have my lunch. I have dinner, I think of nothing. It’s sad.”
He was not made to be a traveling salesman any more than he was to be a bureaucrat; there was more genius in the letters than in the salesmanship.
It has been postulated that the aristocrat was ill-adapted for survival in a consumer society because doing business defied the laws of the Old World: an aristocrat-salesman opened himself up to rejection by a member of the bourgeoisie, empowering the customer—in this case the general public—at the expense of the vendor, the traditional leader. Probably as much on account of his thin skin as on account of his name Saint-Exupéry found his rounds difficult. “Customers are selfish,” he concluded, sketching a bug-eyed manager seated in an office decorated with a gun display and a salesman-skin rug. The company safe sported a sign that read: “Don’t even bother. The keys are lost.” It was a life of rebuffs and dead ends, and he was as hilarious on the subject of his lack of aptitude for it as on any subject. He asked Escot to pray to Saint Fiacre for him. He closed a letter with a tombstone marked “Here lies the last Saurer customer. RIP.”
He did not report on his triumphs because there were none. In his year or so on the road Saint-Exupéry sold, depending on the account, somewhere between one truck and no trucks at all. (The average Saurer salesman took a commission on three to four trucks monthly.) If his position was ever in jeopardy he was saved by the very traits that proved so undesirable in a salesman. He had a reputation as an artist, an eccentric, a practical joker, but the head of the company happened to have the soul of a poet and a weakness for eccentrics. He could not discuss Baudelaire with most of his employees; he had reason not to discuss sales figures with Saint-Exupéry. This was not the last time Saint-Exupéry would benefit from the place of honor in which France places literature. Despite all the country’s rigorous categorizing, her politicians are commonly published authors, her generals are members of the Académie Française, and the intelligentsia sits close to the seat of power. To take as examples only some of those whose paths Saint-Exupéry crossed, at the Vilmorins’ or later: Poincaré was elected to the Académie Française; Herriot had been a professor of literature and in any capacity sounded the part; de Gaulle was an intellectual who had fallen out with Pétain when he got too noisy about the volumes he had ghostwritten for his mentor; Vilmorin was said to be able to recite Ubu roi by heart; Pierre-Georges Latécoère collected rare books.
In the end, late in the winter of 1926, Saint-Exupéry left Saurer of his own volition. He appears to have done so without any visible prospects, although he had an idea at the time that his literary efforts were soon to pay off. Otherwise the future remained uncertain. He returned to Paris, where he had never entirely fit in and where he now fit in less than ever. As often as he had been able to during the Saurer exile he had rejoined his Parisian friends. He did so in the manner that would become Jacques Bemis’s, slowly finding that “After so long an absence one loses one’s place, one is no longer at home.” He learned that a stranger who comes to town provokes curiosity and that a stranger who comes to the city has to earn this attention. To his mother he wistfully described his homecomings, almost exactly in the words with which he would paint Bernis’s in Southern Mail. He returned to the metropolis—still before he was to become one—“like an explorer from Africa.” He called around, only to find that life had gone on without him, that his friends were busy or out of town. In Southern Mail, Bernis goes off to a dance hall; in 1926, Saint-Exupéry fell back on the ever-accommodating Jean Escot, whom he dragged off to the cinema—and out of the cinema in mid-film if the feature did not meet with his expectations—or kept up late. (The films that most seemed to delight were Chaplin’s The Pilgrim and Murnau’s The Last Laugh.) One evening early in the year he sat Escot down in the Café Napolitain and watched as he read his story “L’Aviateur.” He then drilled him on his reactions. He saw a certain amount of his sister Simone, who was studying in Paris to be an archivist and was as engrossed in her work as her brother was indifferent to his. He discovered that there is nothing longer than a rainy Paris Sunday spent alone.
The beau monde slowly welcomed him back, but the truth of the matter was that Saint-Exupéry had lost his taste for their life. Probably the lingering memory of the broken engagement soured him in part. He began to complain of the posturings and chatterings of various factions of the idle upper class, which he now referred to as “cette fausse culture.” His disdain for the life of a gigolo found its origins here. He savaged this world in a letter to his mother: “I don’t like people who feel chivalrous when they dress up as musketeers for a costume ball.” She thought he was being difficult. He insisted, however, on the virulence of this new allergy, and began to talk a good deal about the supremacy of the interior life, which he opposed to the flamboyant, rigged-up emotions of the drawing room. This world seemed the only one of any integrity, although he knew this was not a socially convenient address. “You must forgive me for not being accessible and for remaining so much inside myself,” he wrote his mother. Idle conversation bored him; facile reasoning angered him; pretention and posturing silenced him; public revelations of intimate details made him roar. He could be garrulous but remained entirely mute—on paper and in conversation—on the subject of his personal life. He was so in late 1925, when Gabrielle lost her infant son, as well as in the summer of 1926, when Marie-Madeleine died and he watched his mother bury a second child. “The more intimate the feeling, the more I am unable and the more I find it repugnant to show it,” he wrote her later by way of explanation, although he would not always be so apologetic about his silences. He did not hesitate to condemn those who violated his code, or failed to appreciate it, or who lived grandly and publicly. To his mother’s extreme displeasure, he was particularly vitriolic on the subject of certain family members, whom he found hypocritical. He complained t
hat she could not expect him to like this kind of person.
Saint-Exupéry’s impatience with all that glittered extended to his views of literature. He had begun to offer literary counsel to Bertrand de Saussine’s lovely sister Renée in the fall of 1923, when his engagement was unraveling. “One needs to learn not to write but to see,” the unpublished poet had advised, with feeling, that fall. Three and a half years later he was proclaiming, “One needs to live in order to write.” The relationship narrowly escaped a premature end when Renée’s elder sister dared to compare Pirandello to Ibsen in a salon de thé one afternoon. “Métaphysique de concierge,” muttered Saint-Exupéry, upsetting a café table as he stormed out of La Dame Blanche, leaving a silenced restaurant in his wake. He could not forgive Pirandello for allowing the theatergoer the illusion of thought; he felt the playwright misled his audience by allowing them to toy with metaphysics with the same ease with which they might manipulate a deck of cards. Nothing was more unforgivable in his mind than this kind of facility. He worried that glibness too easily obscured meaning, that we learned how to write well and to speak well but not to reason well. He detested people who wrote to amuse themselves, who “concerned themselves overly with style,” and fell out with Marc Sabran on this subject. Only one thing mattered to a writer: “One needs,” insisted the twenty-four-year-old, “to have something to say.”