by Stacy Schiff
Each of the women in Saint-Exupéry’s life offered memorials to him. Madame de Saint-Exupéry wrote a book of poems, published by Gallimard. Consuelo—who in 1946 became the second Saint-Exupéry to publish in America with Kingdom of the Rocks*—sculpted effigies of her husband and of the Little Prince. Madame de B published a biography of her friend under the name Pierre Chevrier in 1949. Three very different women, their grief took them in separate directions. Madame de Saint-Exupéry put in sober and discreet appearances at commemorative events for her son, as she had at the Hôtel Pont-Royal in 1936. She was on hand when a plaque was added to the Panthéon in 1965 but died three years before one was affixed to the apartment building on the place Vauban in 1975. She was ninety-seven years old, and had survived all but two of her children.
Madame de B masterfully managed her friend’s literary legacy, evidently not without emotion at the outset. In October 1946 the British writer Richard Aldington reported to the poet H. D. that Madame de B had asked him to contribute a piece on Saint-Exupéry to a sort of Festschrift she was putting together.† “She is a rather tragical figure, doping herself with ‘Scotch’ to try to forget him—they were to have been married the day after he was killed, so how can I refuse?” he wrote, stretching the truth a little. In her correspondence with Saint-Exupéry’s American publishers, Madame de B acknowledged her grief but did not allow it to interfere with the business at hand. She discreetly arranged for all publishing decisions and all manuscript copies to bypass Consuelo and remained on good terms with all parties while Gallimard and Reynal & Hitchcock ironed out their differences. She has proved one of the most stalwart defenders of the faith: to this day a biographer’s query sent to the Association des Amis de Saint-Exupéry in Paris—an organization in which she holds no official position—is answered by Madame de B. The Saint-Exupéry family controls the rights in their uncle and great-uncle’s works; Madame de B remains in possession of the greatest cache of papers, those entrusted to her by Saint-Exupéry when he left France in 1940, the notebooks, the datebooks, his correspondence, and the original typescript of Citadelle.
Consuelo—whose tantrums and crises Madame de B felt it her obligation to attempt to minimize—continued on her independent way. She was seen around New York shortly after her husband’s disappearance on the arm of Denis de Rougemont, for some time her official escort, best known in America as the author of Love in the Western World. In November 1945 Anaïs Nin caught a glimpse of her at a party for André Breton; in her diary she noted that Madame de Saint-Exupéry had about her “the consumed look of a woman who has lived, loved, taken drugs, lost her husband to his passion for air and space” and that she was living with de Rougemont. For a brief time after the war she operated a restaurant-barge on the Seine called Le Petit Prince, endearing herself to no one by appearing in a sailor’s cap bearing the name “Saint-Ex” in gilt lettering. She made spectacular entrances and exits for the next years as the Countess de Saint-Exupéry. In the 1950s she continued to be described as exceedingly beautiful; her voice raspy from alcohol and cigarettes, she remained fully capable of throwing herself into the arms of choice, unsuspecting strangers with tremendous effect, of lording girlishly over an entire room, of beguiling with the story of the earthquake that had turned the house around. She remained troubled by her asthma and burdened by financial woes. In the 1960s she pleaded with French government officials to forgive several years of back taxes; she had no savings and had been threatened with seizure of her property. She spent most of her last days in Grasse, where she died after a prolonged illness in 1979. She was buried in Père-Lachaise next to her second husband, Gómez Carrillo. At the time of their marriage Saint-Exupéry probably thought he would be happy with her and probably also thought he would not; he had been right on both counts. One other woman, a first-rate seductress to the end, paid her own kind of tribute to the author-aviator. Louise de Vilmorin, the writer’s ex-fiancée, is said to have quipped that she would have been better off as Saint-Exupéry’s widow than she had been as Malraux’s mistress.
Five years after Consuelo’s death her papers were sold at auction, much to the displeasure of the family, who formally registered their objection to a sale they could not prevent. Generally traffic in the relics fueled misunderstandings, sometimes escalating into religious wars. Honoring Saint-Exupéry’s sense of discretion while at the same time ensuring his place in the public eye (and, occasionally, paying one’s bills) proved a difficult balancing act. Ségogne fell out with Dalloz when Dalloz sold his 1944 letter; everyone fell out when Pélissier published a fine biography of his house guest in 1951; Ségogne and Renée de Saussine fell out when she published her early letters; many of Saint-Exupéry’s friends were furious when Madame de B allowed Gallimard to publish Citadelle. Although the writer had never expected the work to appear in his lifetime it was not necessarily in any shape to appear. Pélissier claimed that its author had prohibited the publication of the book in 1942. Werth thought Citadelle had been brought out prematurely. Galantière, who had done more to order the work of Saint-Exupéry than anyone else, found it “an unorganized, repetitive bulk” even in the English-language edition, which is two-thirds the length of the French. The mild Becker was on this count severe: “If Saint-Ex knew they had published it,” he groaned, “he would die all over again.”
Citadelle was the third of Saint-Exupéry’s works to be published posthumously in France, after Lettre à un otage and Le Petit Prince. All of the earlier titles found their way back into print after the war, when Gallimard, no longer the embarrassed publisher of Pilote de guerre, was resurrected as the anti-German publisher of Saint-Exupéry. Lettre à un otage was published at the end of 1944; the appearance of the elegiac text—hailed by one critic as “le plus beau texte depuis la Libération“—was in the wake of its author’s disappearance cause for hagiography.* Le Petit Prince followed in 1946: the tale of the imperious innocent who falls to earth, makes a quick study of the men behind its curtains, and ultimately disappears without a trace read differently in France than it had in New York in 1943. As it had been true to its author’s life it was now seen as having eerily predicted his death. The reaction of Adrienne Monnier—the rue de l’Odéon bookseller who, at Jean Prévost’s suggestion, had been the first to publish Saint-Exupéry—was representative. Initially Le Petit Prince struck her as puerile, but she found herself drenched in tears by the end. She realized she was crying not over the book but, belatedly, for Saint-Exupéry, who had poured so much of himself into it. The critics were less moved. In a country that maintains a near-religious faith in appearances it is somewhat blasphemous to claim that the essential is invisible to the eye, sacrilege on a par with the advice Saint-Exupéry had offered years earlier, when he had counseled that a fault of grammar was preferable to one of rhythm. Thirty years would pass before reviewers on either side of the ocean saw in The Little Prince “a thoroughly Gallic and slightly sophisticated version of J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan.” By the time they might have been ready to concede as much the book had become so popular that it was more tempting to go at it with a hatchet.
In 1948 Gallimard brought out Citadelle, a work better read as a gauge of its author’s mood than as a work of philosophy and one that constituted a first strike against his posthumous glory. The book of meditations, delivered in the guise of a desert chieftain handing down his wisdoms to his son, appears a far cry from Night Flight or Wind, Sand and Stars. It was a little bit the Bible Saint-Exupéry wished he could offer men; its language is high-flown, a victim of the timelessness for which he was striving when—intent on rising above his age—he was constantly ambushed by it. (“I have found the necessary style for an English version of Citadelle,” Stuart Gilbert wrote Reynal triumphantly in 1948, having settled on a language rich in “whithers” and “wherefores,” “but it’s rather like walking on a tightrope all the time!”) For all its religious veneer Citadelle departs little from the rest of its author’s oeuvre. The omnipotent, Solomonic chieftai
n is but an extension of the steely, Old Testament Daurat, both of them creations of a man who had neither a father nor a son. The volume’s insistent harping on the need to barter oneself for a greater good is the message of Night Flight revisited; rich in sand foxes and rose trees, the Berber Arcadia of Citadelle is half real, half the land of the Little Prince. The aging chieftain and the impertinent prince are in fact blood relations, detached, tyrannical, well-traveled in their own ways, both of them disdainful of everyday realities. From the Patagonian leper to the transposed squabbles of wartime New York, the arc of Saint-Exupéry’s life can be traced in the text; it represents a piece of spiritual ground marked out by a weary man with a vestigial sense of Catholicism and an innate sense of responsibility who has lived a life thirsting for the values but free of the bounds of both. What is surprising about Citadelle is ultimately not that the author of Night Flight could or would have written such a book but that his themes could remain constant throughout a novel of aviation, a book of personal essays, a children’s allegory, and a succession of philosophical dialogues spoken at the desert court of an imaginary ruler.
France is a country of moralistes; one attempts philosophy there at one’s own risk. Gallimard considered then rejected the idea of bringing out Citadelle in an abridged form, which may have been a disservice to its author. In any event by 1948 the moment was ripe for backlash, and an inaccessible, repetitive tome of didactic suras from an aviator who already seemed on shaky intellectual ground did nothing to enhance Saint-Exupéry’s reputation. He had well enough mastered the cadence of holy writing but his thinking had never been systematic and was not now. Critics took him to task on all counts, even while some of those close to the man continued to think of Citadelle, as had its author, as his masterpiece. (Madame de B has remained a particularly staunch defender.) The work may well represent the fullest expression of his personal convictions but it is his least lucid: only the most energetic admirer can claim Citadelle is not sleep-inducing. V. S. Pritchett railed against the volume’s “tire-somely archaic language” when it was published in England as The Wisdom of the Sands in 1952; French critics found the book “muddled and failed.” It is easy enough to target the inconsistencies in a work that makes a simultaneous case for self-fulfillment and enlightened oligarchy; Le Monde’s reviewer contented himself with pointing up the naïveté of Citadelle tadelle by noting that Saint-Exupéry’s was an Arabian Utopia altogether lacking in oil.
By the time a collection of Saint-Exupéry’s journalistic pieces appeared in the 1950s the most indulgent reviewers were asking that for his own sake the author not be treated as an intellectual, which he was not. Nonetheless there were those who chose to attack him as an imposter, a dabbler, as a doler-out of “prop-driven platitudes.” His heroic message has been more and more heard as unfashionably aristocratic or fascistic; the insistent popularity of The Little Prince has opened him up to regular charges of mawkishness and “boy-scoutism.” “Saint-Exupéry’s image has aged badly,” conceded Françoise Giroud. “He has been made into a Boy Scout, a kind of simpleton.” Once again he has not been redeemed by success. His popularity enrages the critics, who have made a punching bag of the awkward, oversized author. It is easy to argue that Saint-Exupéry was a great writer who—with the possible exception of Night Flight—never wrote a great book, and it is altogether tempting to do so when speaking of the most translated author in the French language. The Little Prince can be read in nearly eighty languages; it continues to sell some 125,000 copies annually in America alone and another 300,000 a year in France. It has assembled a motley fan club and evoked a host of tributes. James Dean had an obsession with the book, which he had hoped to film. Anaïs Nin, experimenting with LSD in the 1950s, could not get the image of the Little Prince out of her mind; the little man teetering on the edge of his planet had become for her the very image of loneliness. The 1/33 has adopted the figure as part of its insignia; Little Princes appear on the tails of the squadron’s Mirages. Paris’s chief gardener has bred a blue rose that bears Saint-Exupéry’s name; in 1987 Soviet astronomers named an asteroid—one large enough to accommodate more than a few sheep—in his honor.* Saint-Exupéry, the Little Prince, and the boa digesting the elephant now appear on the fifty-franc note. The work has been adapted several times for both the screen and television; stage productions proliferate; songs have been written in its honor; The Little Prince even had its moment as a Broadway musical. The book has proved Saint-Exupéry’s most popular and enduring work, even if—as a classic of flight—it survives on a shelf alongside Mary Poppins, Peter Pan, and The Wizard of Oz.
Saint-Exupéry himself has been less well-served, not only by those who point to his sales figures in France—he is among Gallimard’s best-selling authors—and argue that his largest audience is among those studying at vocational schools. Particularly in light of his death his myth has been cultivated at the expense of the man; survived by nearly everyone he knew, he has been buried under fifty years of eulogies. Some like him there, where they consider him safe; he is not often allowed to go out with a biographer unchaperoned. His admirers, like his critics, are left to attend not to the man but to the legend. He was a visionary but he was no saint, as he had himself reminded Pélissier in 1943 after the mishap on the stairs, when he felt he had reached the limits of his endurance. His fall from literary grace has been a particularly painful one because he occupied such an uncomfortable seat in the first place. One of his French apologists has explained his maddening offenses along these lines: “He manages to eschew Cartesian thinking, to sidestep the subtlety of our rhetoricians, to rise above our Talmudic taste for criticism—in short, to escape all of our national vices.” The independence of mind that cost him so dearly in his lifetime was to continue to undermine him afterward. In the end popular because he speaks to all men, he remains suspect precisely because he is too broad for any category.
Perhaps because he lived so much tangled up in paradox Saint-Exupéry was fated to be misconstrued. He slips through nets, embraces inconsistencies. As a pioneer, he lived in the past; as a man of science, he believed above all in instinct; as a writer, he mistrusted language—and intellectuals. He shied from the trappings and obligations of the aristocratic life while retaining a worldview that was entirely seigneurial. He staked his reputation on the fraternity of men and yet was in his heart an elitist and in his life unclubbable, drafting hymns to discipline and duty while routinely pushing the limits of both. Co-opted by every school in turn—even the existentialists found a use for him—he was at the end of the day claimed by no one. Down to the smallest detail we have fumbled in our attempts to pin him down. The plaque to his memory at Saint-Maurice (plans to convert the chateau into a Saint-Exupéry museum are only now underway) gives the wrong date for his birth; the plaque on the place Vauban wildly exaggerates his tenure there. His name is spelled incorrectly on the original issue of the fifty-franc note. Doubtless Saint-Exupéry would have forgiven these peccadilloes, almost appropriate given his own clumsiness with a calendar. Others mellowed, too, on his account. In 1959 his name came up at a luncheon when de Gaulle was reminded of a visit he had made to New York during the early years of the war. Sadly the president of the Republic recalled the writer and his stubbornness: “Several years later, we both wound up in Algiers. He tried to make an appointment with me. I thought about it; I said to myself: ‘I think after all I’ll make him wait a bit.’ And, hélas, I never saw him. This has caused me tremendous sorrow. The fact is, there are two men in me: the man and the general. Sometimes the man is willing to do something that the general cannot do, not yet, not right away.”
Saint-Exupéry would have appreciated the predicament. On the page he could sound every ounce the adventurer but he remained as much the vulnerable, anguished child with the insatiable appetite for understanding as the daring Übermensch of legend, as much the cosmic urchin as the desert chieftain. Rarely realistic, never practical, he was as overly human as he was larger than life. He kne
w well that—as he phrased it in an early draft of Lettre à un otage—man blushes, hesitates, doubts, stutters. He romanced his time more than it courted him; especially in the last years of his life he was the last to know the kind of grandeur of which he wrote, the open minds and open spaces conjured by his name. He had a greater experience of failure, of chance, than most who shared his taste for the heroic. On paper he turned this—along with the loose grasp of reality that in his lifetime was known as distraction—to his advantage. He made a virtue of the obstacle; he knew, or discovered, that grandeur lurks in unexpected places. From a decidedly earthbound life he culled the loftier moments and the best of these, with much effort, he committed to the page. The work adds up only to an armful, some of it dated, much of it flawed. But it is all of it rich in spirit: it makes us want to overreach ourselves. It makes us dream.