by Stacy Schiff
Sunday morning Saint-Exupéry came down to breakfast to report good-humoredly that he had got lost upstairs in search of his bathroom. (It adjoined his room.) He met two-year-old Land Lindbergh; it seemed to Anne that their guest was overwhelmed by the beauty of her golden-haired son. He played happily on the beach with Land and with Land’s elder brother, Jon, who must have shared his mother’s enthusiasm for the Frenchman; the following year he asked if he were one of the saints of France. After a swim the Lindberghs drove Saint-Exupéry the few miles to Huntington, where Raoul de Roussy de Sales, seriously ill with cancer, had taken a summer home. Saint-Exupéry spent the twenty minutes in the car relating the story of his near-drowning. The Lindberghs retrieved their guest late in the afternoon, finding him and his deck of cards on Roussy de Sales’s porch; the ride home was devoted to the desert, and to the importance of danger and solitude. The talk went on and on—“There are the people one can talk to and there are the people one cannot talk to,” explained the indefatigable Frenchman, “there is no middle ground”—through dinner, during a walk on the beach, over a nightcap of milk and ginger ale. It continued the next morning, when the Lindberghs drove Saint-Exupéry back into New York. By now he had explicated the story of Jacob and Esau, addressed the subject of faith, and launched into a fabulous parable about sheep farming in Patagonia, which to his mind proved that nature always exacted a price for man’s progress. So distracted was the ordinarily meticulous Lindbergh by the conversation that his wife was feverishly translating that he ran out of gas on the ramp to the Fifty-ninth Street bridge. “For the second time in two days,” wrote Anne, “Saint-Ex stands bent over the hood of an engine of a Lindbergh.”
She had plenty of other reasons to remember the weekend guest, who left her feeling as if her “mind had been quickened” and whom she was never to see again. She perhaps best described what had taken place as “summer lightning,” which was as it should have been for the petite, French-speaking diplomat’s daughter who had caught so much of her husband’s aviation fever and the courteous, subtle-minded Frenchman who between them wrote nearly all of the most lyrical accounts we have of flight. Anne Lindbergh continued to think and worry, often, about Saint-Exupéry, who “became for me the lens through which I saw the war.” Her novel The Steep Ascent went out “like a letter to him,” the one person she felt sure would understand it. Five years after the visit she felt the need to remind herself that she could not have asked for a better marriage. If Charles was the earth to her Saint-Exupéry was, she wrote, like a sun or a moon or a star. She was surprised by the depth of her grief when she heard of his death, a loss she felt as she had that of her sister and over which she was still mulling months later. “Are you going to look back all your life to an hour’s conversation on a train with a stranger who could not even speak your language, and you only haltingly, his? But obviously he spoke ‘my language’ better than anyone I have ever met, before or since,” she chastised herself. Her husband was a little surprised to hear of her attachment to Saint-Exupéry, owning up to some jealousy. He had his own, more prosaic reason to remember the Frenchman. Two months after his visit, Lindbergh went to Abercrombie & Fitch for a new pair of tennis shoes; he had lent his previous pair to Saint-Exupéry. “I think he probably left them on the beach; he could not possibly have packed them in his suitcase wet,” noted Lindbergh, who would focus on the events of the next few years through a different lens altogether.
Saint-Exupéry spent the following weekend in Vermont at the Middlebury College summer school, at the invitation of André Morize, its director. He gave no formal lecture but in a series of casual talks proved to be charm incarnate; when he was not regaling his admirers (two-thirds of the summer-session students were women) with his account of having piloted over Africa with a lion cub breathing down his neck he delighted with sleight-of-hand. On both counts he drew crowds. In one of his more memorable stunts he asked a member of his audience to pick a card from his deck and return it to him; he then reversed it, producing a different card. So adept was he that he left the French faculty—many of them old friends—convinced that he operated with a trick deck. A luncheon held in his honor at the Dog Team Tavern on the twelfth proved equally convivial. Dorothy Thompson was in the vicinity and dropped by, evidently having heard that the French writer was in town. Pierre de Lanux, himself a brilliant conversationalist, sat between the two dignitaries, ostensibly to translate. In photos of the afternoon Saint-Exupéry appears relaxed and in his element, at times ebullient. That evening he set out for a drive with Yvonne Michel, a Parisian friend who was on staff for the summer, and a young consular official; he spent the excursion recounting the progress that had been made on the atomic front, describing nuclear fission in vivid detail. In the middle of his lecture, rather eerily, the aurora borealis flickered across the sky.
He was back in New York by August 20, 1939, when he spent a long evening talking with Roussy de Sales. It seemed to both men now that war was inevitable. Saint-Exupéry confided his fears of the kind of conflict aviation could make possible, a war in which a front is no longer a front. Three days later German foreign minister von Ribbentrop was in Moscow to sign the nonagression pact, to which the French reaction was the classic “Nous sommes cocus” (“We are cuckolded”). Holed up at the Ritz-Carlton Saint-Exupéry spent his day calling France. On the twenty-fourth—or, as he put it later, “when the headlines got too big”—he sailed home on the île de France, as did Yvonne Michel and several other friends. He spent most of the trip in the captain’s cabin, where he familiarized himself with all the details of the crossing, an especially agreeable one as there were vast provisions and few passengers. The travelers lived on caviar until August 30, when the île de France docked in Le Havre. Hitler having invaded Poland, France declared war on Germany four days later, and Saint-Exupéry returned to Paris to find his mobilization letter waiting for him. On September 9 he reported to the Toulouse-Francazal airfield, in uniform.
~
Captain de Saint-Exupéry was thirty-nine years old and the military doctors were not much impressed with him. The best use of him seemed to be as a navigation instructor, and so he spent the early days of the war—which most of the French pretended for some time had not yet begun—in the rear; it may have been the only time in his life he was not happy to be in Toulouse. He began flying a Simoun as often as four times a day and, at least at the outset, performing mathematical feats on a blackboard more for his own contagious amusement than in connection with any course of study. Naturally this was not sufficient; the greatest regulation-busting campaign of his life was now launched, from the site of his first triumphs in the air. He appealed to his friends for help in being assigned a more active role in the war but chose among them wisely; some were intent on keeping him as far from any battle as possible. No one was better connected or more likely to accede to his wishes than Madame de B, to whom he wrote passionately late in October. He was suffocating, he was disgusted with the idea of being kept from danger, he begged her with all his might to get him transferred to an active unit. She must save him, by which he meant get him to the front.
It should be said that at least some of Saint-Exupéry’s frustration was shared by the majority of mobilized men, bored and exasperated by a war that was not yet a war. They had headed off with near-relief that the long, post-Munich suspense was behind them; over the course of the winter what Winston Churchill termed an air of “calm aloofness” gave way to a frustration that was to leave the French military unprepared and hugely demoralized when the drôle de guerre turned, in the spring, into the Battle of France. Early in November though, having visited a military field and briefly retasted the joys of plain, ordered squadron life, Saint-Exupéry was more desperate than ever. “I am not embarrassed to ask this of you. It’s not about a job or a grant; it’s for an assignment to the front, in a fighter squadron. This is vital to me. And even if it’s difficult, even if it’s complicated, I have no scruples about my request, because it�
�s the first time I have a total favor to ask of you,” he pleaded with Madame de B. He got as far as a medical examination but was declared unfit to fly. Among the obvious impairments were a frozen left shoulder, a body stiff with old fractures, and a history of headaches.
Undeterred, he called on his old friend General Davet, then commander of the bomber school in Pau. Davet felt strongly that if a man’s heart was in the job he should be allowed to take on that job, even if his was a thirty-nine-year-old heart; he personally walked Saint-Exupéry through a maze of bureaucracy that led ultimately to Guy La Chambre, the Ministre de l’Air. Saint-Exupéry no longer had the reflexes to pilot a fighter plane; he was unwilling to fly a bomber. In a happy compromise he was assigned on November 26 to a reconnaissance group, the 2/33, then based 120 miles east of Paris in the Champagne village of Orconte. As if testimony were needed to his powers of persuasion (or those of his connections) Guillaumet, who had also requested to be assigned to a fighter squadron, was refused on the grounds of his age and called up instead as a transport pilot. He was two years younger than his great friend. Saint-Exupéry celebrated his transfer twice, once in Paris at the Deux-Magots, in what must have seemed a very different celebration than that following the Libyan crash. In Toulouse he assembled his comrades for a drink, before his departure. The small gathering was marred by one remark, reflecting a belief widely enough held that someone had to voice it. Asserted a young lieutenant: “In order to fly in the military the airline pilot has everything to learn.” “Except modesty,” parried the irritated captain.
No one in Orconte was particularly happy to see Saint-Exupéry. He was legendary—as were his distractions—and a young, eager military pilot would have been far preferable to a legend. “All the same he isn’t coming to fly?” asked Lieutenant René Gavoille, who served double-duty as the group’s mechanic. “Is he going to make a movie or what?” wondered Lieutenant Jean Israël. “Isn’t he forty?” moaned Lieutenant-observer Jean Dutertre. None of them yet suspected that they were to become the characters in his next book. He was the object of much fascination as he emerged from the staff car in a less-than-natty uniform and stepped onto the muddy terrain on the afternoon of December 3. Once over the threshold of the barracks he seemed more timid than pretentious but did not flinch under the curious stares. François Laux stepped forward: “Lieutenant Laux, squadron commander.” “Saint-Exupéry, pilot,” replied the newcomer, who outranked him. The rest of the introductions made, Saint-Exupéry declared—as only a man who has romanticized a desolate strip of sand has the authority to do of a rustic, freezing barracks—“It’s very nice here. If you will accept me, I should be happy to stay.” He had worked his magic; within a day or two, remembered Israël, “he had tamed us.” The extroverted Gavoille was charged with Saint-Exupéry’s initiation into his new métier; aware of his reputation, he approached the novice with some apprehension. In the eyes of the French air force Saint-Exupéry had always been a fine pilot, however, and with Gavoille’s help he adapted quickly to the first modern aircraft he was to fly, the Potez 63. (Unfortunately the Potez—a brand-new, 700-horsepower machine—was an airplane obsolescent from the start, outpaced by nearly 100 miles an hour by a Messerschmitt.) As the squadron’s caution melted into respect, Gavoille’s attentions became doting; he would later be said to be the aging aviator’s equerry.
Saint-Exupéry remained true to form in most respects. He suited up in his sixty-five pounds of equipment for a first high-altitude flight, which took him to 30,000 feet, where the temperature drops to —55°F. You must not have been very warm, observed his colleagues afterward. The newcomer demurred, cataloguing only slight discomforts; he was interrupted by the news that he had forgotten to plug in his pressure suit. He daydreamed in the corner of the mess, where no one disturbed him; his room was littered with American-made gadgets, the pride of which was his electric razor. And counter to all regulations Saint-Exupéry was allowed to bring the second-hand De Soto he had bought that fall—a rare compromise in his life; he had wanted a Bugatti, and thought the De Soto hopelessly bourgeois—to Orconte, where it quickly became the entire squadron’s car. In it he would pilot his friends at forty to ninety miles an hour, depending on the intensity of the conversation. This amounted to a hair-raising experience for his passengers. Hurtling along the icy roads the reconnaissance pilot generally missed the turnoff for Orconte, an oversight no one dared mention to him until he had decelerated. Israël remembered a trip back to Orconte from a dinner with a neighboring squadron as the most terrifying of all his war missions: at high speed Saint-Exupéry skated over the ice, headlights out due to the blackout, bent on proving to his passenger that he had not had too much to drink.
In Orconte he was billeted with a farming family and their three children, in the largest room of the house. He had not initially been welcome here either. When the captain appeared at her home, stooping so as to clear the doorway of the bedroom in question (something he would not always remember to do), Madame Scherschell informed him he would be more comfortable in the nearby château. Saint-Exupéry took one look around the room, of which the street offered a full view, and declared, “I like it here. I’ll stay.” To the Scherschells, whose home would be immortalized in Flight to Arras, he was a strange man indeed. He was often in the house in the afternoon, and one day came upon Madame Scherschell making butter in the kitchen. He installed himself at her side. “You know, Captain, butter takes a long time to make and it can’t be very interesting to a man like yourself,” she objected. Her house guest was not so easily dismissed. In his room he wrote furiously every evening, rapidly turning out what were to Madame Scherschell long sheets of yellow paper and what were in fact his ideas for a screenplay of Wind, Sand and Stars, as well as those for a screenplay of the still-unfinished “Igor”; his thoughts on the war, in the form of a long essay; contributions to his ongoing book, the “poem” to which his attachment was growing; a fair number of letters. Madame Scherschell resisted neither the temptation to read these nor that to discourage her guest’s eccentricities by turning off his electricity when his light burned too late. Saint-Exupéry wrote tributes to his bed at the Scherschells, which could not have surprised anyone who tried to wake him to report to the field for a 7:00 a.m. breakfast. “A freezing bed is wonderful because if you keep still you luxuriate in a warm river, but if you move a foot you tumble into a polar current; the bed is full of mystery, with its Gulf Stream and its ice berghs (is that the correct spelling?),” he wrote Léon Werth when he had moved on to less primitive accommodations, with which he was less enthralled. “In temperate climates I wilt with boredom,” he concluded, having come to know himself a little.
Orconte in 1939 was mild compared to Orconte in 1940, when Saint-Exupéry wrote Becker that it was a far cry from the Ritz-Carlton. France’s mood changed generally that winter, the coldest in fifty years; the public that had feasted its eyes on Snow White now made Nostradamus a bestseller. Only one mission was flown by the 2/33 Reconnaissance Group in December, and it ended badly. The snow fell and fell, which made missions—vexing enough given the vast zone to be covered, the very precise German fighter planes, and a complete absence of radio navigation—impracticable. All was white as far as the eye could see; the unsheltered Potezes looked like a mutant breed of polar hedgehogs. There was little to do but wait, a particularly nerve-racking exercise for those in the air force who had discovered that their equipment was as flawed as it was scarce. The Potez’s guns and controls froze at the high altitudes for which the aircraft was designed; nine months after the war was declared the sight of a French airplane in the sky was so rare that the antiaircraft batteries fired at anything they saw on the generally correct assumption it was German. “It’s understandable but it’s not funny,” commented Saint-Exupéry, his aircraft grazed by friendly fire. The population of Germany was half as much again as that of France, but in the air there were ten to twenty German aircraft for every French one. A. J. Liebling, who had taken over Janet Fl
anner’s New Yorker beat, was told by one French flyer stationed near Orconte: “Some of the German pilots are good, but most not so good. Nearly all the planes are good, though, and since the man in the plane you’re after may by chance be one of the good pilots, you cannot afford to take anything for granted.” Saint-Exupéry was given a brief summary of the pleasures of reconnaissance flying shortly after his arrival: “You’ll be flying over Germany without guns or controls. But don’t take it too hard, for it really doesn’t matter. The German fighters always down you before you know they are there.”
He trained for high altitude before Christmas, spent with the Scherschells, and in the New Year, but was to fly no war missions until late March, when the Potezes were replaced by the new Bloch 174’s. He had plenty of time to write, to prove his prowess at chess, to reflect, and to draw; in 1939 he began scribbling a little man over and over, often with wings, or standing on a cloud, in one case menaced by a tiny devil representing a Messerschmitt. A member of the squadron asked why he often drew the figure chasing butterflies; Saint-Exupéry answered that he had endeared himself to him for his pursuit of “a realistic ideal.” Increasingly demoralized as the winter wore on, he began to speak and write of “this odd planet on which I live.” “The next time around,” he vowed, “I’m going to change planets.”