by Stacy Schiff
Saint-Exupéry complained to Renée de Saussine in January, when the Argentine heat is at its peak, that the network of 2,400 miles over which he presided was sucking from him “second by second, all that remains of my beloved youth and liberty.” This was ironic, in light of the fact that those same 2,400 miles offered him some of his best subjects. He was worn out, too, by the money he felt obligated to spend each month. Buenos Aires had been called “one of the most remarkably easy places in the world for getting rid of money quickly,” and Saint-Exupéry bowed to the local mores. Here was a city in which the trades had not yet matured and repair was unheard of; one bought a new foreign-made watch—at the city’s greatly inflated prices—rather than attempting a vain search for someone who might be able to fix an old one. Saint-Exupéry sent about 3,000 francs to his mother monthly, which left him a purse of more than 15,000. Like most of the money he earned in his life this sum disappeared quickly, sometimes in short shopping sprees, sometimes in spontaneous, lordly displays of philanthropy. Daurat once commented that Saint-Exupéry’s scorn for lucre was equaled only by his need for it, and it was true that he seemed as bewildered by its presence, of which this was his first experience, as by its absence. (In a city obsessed with style, he remained all the same as eccentrically dressed as ever.) To Renée Saint-Exupéry complained that he was drained by all of his shopping. His acquisitions had begun to crowd him out of his apartment, and while he did not have the remotest need for any of them he could not seem to stop collecting. What was worse, longing made the world a magnificent place. Now that he had bought himself the supple leather carrying case, the fine felt hat, and the sophisticated chronometer of which he dreamed, what had he left to hope for?
This lifestyle, of course, did little to staunch a steady flow of nostalgia. Later Saint-Exupéry was to write that he had always before him the image of his first night flight in Argentina, but in Argentina, at least when at rest, he had eyes only for a corner of France. Exhausted though he was he slept little, and the book he now began, at night, about the night, originally opened in the front vestibule of Saint-Maurice. The perils of an Argentine flight among the stars made him dream of the sanctuary of his mother’s room, of the bliss of being tucked into bed at night, the sheets smoothed around him. (The image, a little abbreviated, wound up in Night Flight, as in nearly every work of Saint-Exupéry’s.) He wrote to thank his mother for the rich store of childhood memories she had bestowed upon him, which he now realized to be his prized possession. He read and raved about Rosamond Lehmann’s Dusty Answer (Poussière), a melancholic novel about the tenacity of adolescent impressions, one which reminded him of the importance of what he called “tribe.”
Repeatedly in South America he sought out the kinds of enchantments for which he had developed a taste in childhood. Nowhere was this more true than in Concordia, to which the hospitable couple in the old Ford had brought him for dinner. In an evening that he wrote up in 1932 and that later became a part of Wind, Sand and Stars, he made the acquaintance of an old house very much in the league of Saint-Maurice. A crumbling, once-luxurious 1886 citadel, this run-down mansion with its caved-in floors, its decaying lintels, had more charm for Saint-Exupéry than all of the steel girders of Buenos Aires. In his eyes it was not dilapidated but “a friend of time.” He took great aristocratic satisfaction in its decay—even more in the Fuchses’ refusal to apologize for its condition—and began at once to muse about its underground chambers, its buried chests, its treasures. The girls of the house, said by their father to be wholly untamed, were of a breed he knew and cherished. The Fuchses’ two adolescent daughters looked on visitors with well-placed suspicion; they tamed iguanas, mongeese, foxes, monkeys, bees; they did their best to make Saint-Exupéry squirm at the dinner table with tales of the snakes that nested under his chair. Their crumbling wild garden became for him a perfect symbol of the endurance of mystery, the girls another incarnation of the kind of fairy princesses he had always known existed. Even the leper of Puerto Deseado took Saint-Exupéry back to his early years, reminding him of the time he had spent recovering from bronchitis in the boarding school infirmary. He remembered how the noises of the school had reached him but had meant nothing to him, sounding—in his land of temperature charts and medications—like the murmurs of a dream world. This sensation of living outside of time must, he mused, be precisely that of the leper.
Mail from his Paris-based friends could send Saint-Exupéry off on a long riff in praise of the Brasserie Lipp or the chestnut trees of the boulevard Saint-Germain, even while he readily admitted that he did not feel at home in Paris. “I would be so incapable of living in France,” he wrote his mother in July. Exile was a complicated business: “You vaguely hold to the idea of returning and finding everything as you left it. You know this is impossible, but you so much hate the fact that life hurries so.” He saw it, a little sadly, very much as Breyten Breytenbach would in our day, as “an engagement with an elsewhere that cannot be reached.” There was nothing charming about living as an expatriate, an idea Saint-Exupéry tried to impress upon his mother when at this time his sister Simone began to talk about leaving for Indochina to work as an archivist. He was firmly opposed to the idea: Indochina was expensive, it was hot, it was thick with opium, and Simone could not be counted on to choose her friends wisely, he argued. (It was clear that generally speaking Saint-Exupéry did not think a woman, let alone one of his sisters, to be suited to such an adventure.)
The Saint-Exupéry children, toward 1906. From left to right: Marie-Madeleine, Gabrielle, François, Antoine, Simone (photo credit 9.1)
The château of Saint-Maurice-de-Rémens, as it appears today from the edge of its “park dark with firs and linden trees” (photo credit 9.2)
(LEFT) Jean de Saint-Exupéry, the writer’s father (BELOW) Marie de Saint-Exupéry, the writer’s mother (photo credit 9.3)
Antoine, the “first-rate devil” (photo credit 9.4)
(ABOVE) Page one of a two-page letter to Jean Escot, written in 1925 but dated by Saint-Exupéry, the truck salesman, “the day after yesterday.” Saint-Exupéry’s rendering of his hard-hearted customer—the safe is marked “Don’t even bother; the keys are lost” and the office is decorated with a salesman-skin rug—bears a striking resemblance to an early drawing (RIGHT) of the Little Prince’s businessman, made seventeen years later. (photo credit 9.5)
Saint-Exupéry, chief of the Cape Juby airfield, with his colleagues (photo credit 9.6)
(ABOVE) Cape Juby, circa 1928 (photo credit 9.7)
(RIGHT) Three ages of aviation: (top) a Breguet 14, the World War I biplane in which Saint-Exupéry began his career; (center) a Caudron-Simoun, which, he discovered, was not nearly so elastic; (bottom) a Lockheed P-38, one of the fastest planes in the sky in 1943 and the aircraft in which Saint-Exupéry disappeared (photo credit 9.8)
Marcel Bouilloux-Lafont (center) and Saint-Exupéry (a few steps to his right) at the ceremony for the opening of the Buenos Aires—Río Gallegos line, the only route which Saint-Exupéry actually in part prospected. The two men continued to keep their distance: the day after this photograph was taken the pilot incurred the public wrath of Bouilloux-Lafont when he landed a brand-new Latécoère 28 in a ditch, with the airline owner aboard. (photo credit 9.9)
Saint-Exupéry with an arm around Henri Guillaumet in Mendoza, Argentina, just after Guillaumet’s superhuman trek through the Andes, immortalized by Saint-Exupéry in Wind, Sand and Stars: “I stared at your face: it was splotched and swollen, like an overripe fruit that has been repeatedly dropped on the ground. You were dreadful to see …” Jean-René Lefèbvre stands at Guillaumet’s right, in the fedora. (photo credit 9.10)
Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry (photo credit 9.11)
The couple together in the early 1930s (photo credit 9.12)
“He left permanent wounds in the hearts of those who saw him smile, even once,” wrote Saint-Exupéry’s cohort of the 1930s, Léon-Paul Fargue. (photo credit 9.13)
Saint-Exupé
ry and his mechanic, André Prévot, before an intact Simoun. Prévot’s loyalty to the pilot was largely to be rewarded in medical bills. (photo credit 9.14)
The same Simoun as it looked after its encounter with the Libyan desert, at a speed of 170 miles per hour. “Our situation was hardly ideal,” wrote Saint-Exupéry later in his official report. He inscribed a photo of the remains of the aircraft to his sister with the words, “In memory of an evening of despair.” (photo credit 9.15)
Consuelo seeing her husband off, before a flight of 1935 (photo credit 9.16)
The two Madames de Saint-Exupéry in Paris on January 5, 1936, reading the telegrams of congratulation which flooded in when their son and husband was reported alive and well after he had disappeared into thin air for four days, which he spent walking through the Libyan desert. (photo credit 9.17)
(LEFT) Saint-Exupéry conferring with airline officials in Brownsville, Texas, hours before the crash that was to be the end of his second Simoun and—very nearly—of its pilot (photo credit 9.18)
(BELOW) The second Simoun in Guatemala City, hours later. Its pilot was only moderately more intact. The demolished cockpit—from which Saint-Exupéry was extracted—can be seen in the foreground. (photo credit 9.19)
Saint-Exupéry at the luncheon held in his honor at the Dog Team Tavern in Middlebury, Vermont, August 12, 1939. Dorothy Thompson turns to face the camera. Pierre de Lanux—whose conversation was as brilliant as the card tricks Saint-Exupéry performed at this table that afternoon—sits between her and the other visiting dignitary. (photo credit 9.20)
Renée de Saussine (standing at left) and Louise de Vilmorin (to her right) with friends on the beach in Rio de Janeiro, 1930 (photo credit 9.21)
Natalie Paley (photo credit 9.22)
Louise de Vilmorin (photo credit 9.23)
Silvia Reinhardt (photo credit 9.24)
Saint-Exupéry writing The Little Prince in Silvia Reinhardt’s Park Avenue apartment, 1942. Silvia had propped the yellow-haired doll, purchased in a New York candy shop, on the arm of the sofa. (photo credit 9.25)
The “chaser of butterflies” with his own version of a hothouse flower, on what was to become the Little Prince’s planet. (photo credit 9.26)
An unused sketch of the Little Prince, which bears the marks of having been crumpled into a ball by the author (photo credit 9.27)
One of several early sketches for The Little Prince in which the aviator appears, although he is not pictured in the published book (photo credit 9.28)
“He is the best friend I have in the world,” wrote Saint-Exupéry of Léon Werth (right), to whom he dedicated The Little Prince and for whom he wrote Lettre à un otage. (photo credit 9.29)
The author’s inscription in Dorothy Barclay’s copy of The Little Prince. Barclay had earned Saint-Exupéry’s gratitude for having researched a question crucial to him in the writing of the book: How many stars were in the sky? “You would have to be crazy to choose this planet. It is agreeable only at night, when its inhabitants are asleep,” laments the Prince on her half-title page. Underneath, the author begs to differ with his hero, on account, he argues, of such generous souls as Dorothy Barclay. (photo credit 9.30)
The artist Jean Pagès’s sketch of Saint-Exupéry performing his oranges sur le piano, which he did a great deal over his grounded ten months in Algiers, 1943–44. To most ears the result—which could be obtained as well with hard-boiled eggs or lemons—sounded like Debussy. (photo credit 9.31)
John Phillips and Saint-Exupéry in the midst of a furious round of the “game of the six-letter words,” Sardinia, 1944. Phillips was not meant to prevail over the esteemed homme de lettres and found the room automatically emptied whenever he seemed on the verge of doing so. (photo credit 9.32)
French and American members of the 23rd Photo Reconnaissance Squadron having polished off the better part of a 230-liter belly tank of wine. May 28, 1944. A particularly radiant Saint-Exupéry stands with his arm around his commanding officer, René Gavoille. (photo credit 9.33)
René Gavoille dressing the pilot for a high-altitude mission. A year earlier Saint-Exupéry had written his wife that he could not so much as get out of bed, carry a five-pound package, or bend to the ground without pain. “When he was getting dressed,” remembered an American reconnaissance expert, “he was an old grouch.” (photo credit 9.34)
In his greater objections it is difficult not to read his doubts about his own life. Exile is never temporary, he warned. One gets ambushed by it, taken prisoner forever, one becomes someone else: “And it gets no better over the course of a vacation, one day, in France. The vacation over, you always leave again. It’s the worst of diseases.” The subtext of the letter was that Saint-Exupéry knew of what he spoke, having traveled more than the rest of the family put together. The distance from France could only have been increased by the fact that he could not seem to impose his will on his far-off kin: Simone left, against his counsel, for Indochina, where she spent more than twenty happy years. He was as insistent now that the funds he sent be acknowledged speedily as he had once been that the money he requested be sent immediately. It rarely was. Worse, his mother could not be relied upon to use these funds as he directed her to, which was essentially on a life at Saint-Maurice. This threw him into a rage.
The closest Saint-Exupéry came to revisiting the pleasures of Saint-Germain in Argentina was probably in the company of Paul Dony, chief financial officer of Aéropostale in Buenos Aires, and his wife. With Dony Saint-Exupéry reprised some of his early literary habits, uprooting the executive from his Pacheco desk or his bed with a good deal of charm and a sheaf of freshly minted prose. (Cementing his reputation as the world’s worst roommate, Saint-Exupéry once pried Dony from sleep at 2:00 a.m. in Concordia with an authoritative, “Listen to this, and tell me if it’s good.”) But it was at the Donys’ Buenos Aires apartment, late at night, often after a movie, that Saint-Exupéry proved his most winning. Profiting from the couple’s French library, he entertained them with word games, most of his own invention. He would seize their dictionnaire analogique, a sort of loose-limbed thesaurus arranged by clusters of meaning, and torture the couple by asking for the relationship between two seemingly unrelated, or two obviously related, words. What rapport was there, he would inquire, between une caisse and un roulement? When the answer came back “finances” (the first term most commonly indicated a cash register, and the second applied to the use of money), he was triumphant; the correct response was “percussion” (less often une caisse meant a drum, and un roulement a drumroll). He solicited subjects from the couple on which he spontaneously composed sonnets. At other times he chose a volume of verse from the shelf, settled on a second-rate sonnet, and in fifteen minutes tossed off a new version of the poem that not only respected its themes but adhered to the same end rhymes. “Je recommence la littérature française” he announced as he set about transforming these stanzas. He was clearly much amused by these exercises, which showed him in his best light, at his favorite time of day. His gaiety was not of the boisterous kind, Dony noted, but seemed to bubble, when all circumstances were favorable, from a kind of interior well. Unfortunately, if one believes Saint-Exupéry the letter writer, circumstances all too rarely smiled upon him in Buenos Aires, and the Donys’ salon was a rare refuge.
Despite all the complaints—Buenos Aires was odious, he felt old, he regretted the administration-free life of Juby, he hoped to marry—Saint-Exupéry was unquestionably good at what he did. Later one of his Argentine pilots sat long into a stormy, Río Gallegos night with Joseph Kessel explaining why he continued to fly eleven months of the year against an absurd wind when he had no need of the money: “I began out of a love for the sport, but Saint-Ex put the métier in my blood.” As an administrator Saint-Exupéry was a stickler for discipline if not for the rules: the same pilot told Kessel how his boss had once flown the mail for a colleague he had had to penalize, recording his hours in the pilot’s logbook so as not to cost him any of his salar
y. In midyear Guillaumet sang their friend’s praises to Mermoz: