by Stacy Schiff
Pierre-Georges Latécoère owned the airline and built the planes, but the problem of the Río de Oro fell squarely to Didier Daurat, his operations director. Daurat is remembered, mostly thanks to the writings of Saint-Exupéry, for his military discipline and his taciturn rigor. He could as well be immortalized for his creativity. In the first years of the airline—well before the advent of radio—he had equipped Breguet 14’s with carrier pigeons to be released in case of a crash; when the Río de Oro introduced greater dangers he armed the pilots. Then he sent them along the African route in twos, with explicit instructions that the pilot in distress was to facilitate the landing of the escort plane as close as possible to his own. He toyed briefly with the idea of equipping his planes with recordings for the Moors, which might better explain the French enterprise to them; he was convinced he could impress them with the grandeur of the Latécoère vision. Ultimately he arranged for native interpreters to accompany the pilots. Flying majestically along amid the mail sacks, their jewel-encrusted swords snug in their belts, the blue-robed Moors lent a new romance to the mails. They were unusual interpreters in that they were, with a few exceptions, unilingual; their mission was less to translate than to negotiate ransoms.
In 1927, after a number of grisly incidents and aware that the Spanish were lying in wait for one last disaster, Daurat realized he had still not solved the problem of Cape Juby. What he needed at this delicate outpost was an ambassador, someone who could convince the Spanish of the viability of the airline, who could make the French presence in the Río de Oro more palatable, who could manage the Moors. He turned quite naturally to Saint-Exupéry. An aristocratic name would impress the Spanish; it was already clear that the pilot had a certain charm; he was familiar with Juby, after nearly ten months flying the African mails. It has been suggested that Daurat may have been as eager to put Saint-Exupéry to work as an ambassador as he was to put him to work as an aviator. At the time Saint-Exupéry was on sick leave in France from the airline; a bout with dengue fever had left him crippled with joint pains. A hot, dry climate would alleviate his symptoms. He was recalled that fall to Toulouse and dispatched posthaste to Cape Juby, where he arrived on October 19, 1927. His mission was simple: to revive relations with the Spanish authorities, and “to set off to the rescue of any aviator in danger, at any hour, anywhere in the desert.” He was to be a little bit the Saint Bernard of the Sahara. “The bearers of water in the desert,” he wrote later, “are members of the greatest divinity there is.”
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As often happens in small places, the titles at Cape Juby were large. Colonel de la Peña was known as the inspector general of Cape Juby, though his rule barely extended beyond his fort. Saint-Exupéry was named chief of the airfield, and while he was aware of the modest size of his domain he was pleased with the responsibility the post entailed. It was partly a title that had brought him to Juby in the first place; “de Saint-Exupéry” is a fine aristocratic name, and Didier Daurat gambled correctly on the fact that Colonel de la Peña would be impressed with it. This was ironic, in light of the fact that earlier in the year Saint-Exupéry—never shy about telling anyone how or where to write him—had admonished his mother from Dakar: “Don’t put ‘Count’ on my envelopes.” His title kept him apart, as titles are meant to do, and one thing Saint-Exupéry had always felt, by nature as much as by birth, was painfully apart. He would turn his back on anyone who showed the poor taste to address him as “My dear Count.” This behavior, of course, put him at a distance from another world, one for which his name and his relations if not his fortune—he had none—qualified him.
The beauty of Cape Juby was that, in its utter desolation, its remoteness, it minimized the chilling effect of the de which preceded his surname. Saint-Exupéry may himself have seldom noticed his particule, but those around him, especially at Aéropostale, could not help but do so: if a grand nom stood out anywhere in France in the 1920s it stood out on an airfield. At the same time Cape Juby was instrumental in making his name. From his colleagues he earned a good deal of respect for the amazing feats he would perform in the desert in 1928. While the pilots of la Ligne had always recognized Saint-Exupéry as a creature apart, they now cited his eccentricities instead of his name. For them he may never have been the Count de Saint-Exupéry but he had been de Saint-Exupéry; in the words of one Aéropostale mechanic, he was “a little bit our Queen of England.” By the time he left the Sahara his name had shrunk to the more comfortable Saint-Ex. (The name would be abbreviated once again by the Americans during the war, for whom he became “Major X.”) At the same time, the pilot grew into his family name.
When Saint-Exupéry arrived at Cape Juby, at the age of twenty-seven, he had published a story in a magazine, had been excruciatingly unlucky in love, and had flirted with a few careers, none successfully, before beginning to fly the mail the previous year. His letters to his mother, in whom he confided intimately in the correspondence of his twenties, resound with his fears that he would never amount to anything. He worried that he was lazy; he worried that he tired of himself so quickly; that he would not prove his worth; that he would never find a woman to love. It was as clear to him as to anyone that he did not fit in. “I have turned out so differently than I might have,” he wrote plaintively in 1925. “Please try to appreciate me for what I am.” It was clear, too, that he did not quite know yet what that was. He knew what he did not like: any happiness that rendered one immobile, satisfied, sedentary. Already he had a sense that he might take to a life of adventure, but adventure as he would describe it once he was flying over Africa—“a constant need to discover new places, to let my feet carry me along, to be unsure of the next day”—looked like something else altogether in the unemployed or half-committed. He was angry that the family thought him “a superficial, chattering layabout.” He wanted very much to be taken seriously but could not seem to find the arena in which to prove himself. Before his first trip to Africa, early in 1927, he wrote his mother earnestly that he hoped he would come home “a marriageable man.”
There were not a great number of professions open to a young aristocrat of Saint-Exupéry’s time, particularly to one who did not like to play by the rules and was therefore excluded from a military or diplomatic future. These were and remain the two standard career tracks for the sons of noblemen; two-thirds of all French aristocratic families today include at least one active officer. In October 1926, the month he joined the airline, Saint-Exupéry wrote only half-humorously to Renée de Saussine, the sister of a close friend whom he was unsuccessfully attempting to court by letter, that he wished he could be “un beau gigolo.” It was also one of the options, particularly if one were willing to marry his fortune, which could not have been less the case with Saint-Exupéry. “I wish I were a ‘beau gigolo’ with a handsome tie and a magnificent record collection. I should have trained when I was younger; it’s too late now. And I do regret it. Now that I’m balding it’s not even worth trying,” lamented the pilot.
Even before his hair had begun to thin Saint-Exupéry might have had trouble qualifying for the role. He was a good head taller than most Frenchmen, and awkward, and not handsome by the usual measure. He lumbered around like a bear. His “Mickey-Mouse nose, his black eyes jutting from the sockets, his luminous gaze” made him look almost otherworldly. He paid spectacular inattention to what he wore. What was more, once he had begun flying regularly he would show up at some of the best Parisian addresses with dirt under his nails. His hands were covered with oil; he complained to Renée that he alone found them beautiful. Once in the service of the airline he rather quickly began to turn his back on the world of the manicured, to crack jokes at its expense, a little, at first, out of spite. Within months he had written to another female friend that he was thrilled with his situation at Aéropostale: “I am delighted that it isn’t a sport for gigolos, but a trade.” To a former teacher he mailed a letter from Dakar: “When my engine coughs over the Río de Oro I consider myself very intelligent t
o see everything from a new angle, the memories, the hopes, and the circles of little literary gigolos.” Ultimately the vocation to which he had faintly aspired became a code word for his worst nightmare: in his first novel, a pilot walks into a Dakar bar, “a heavy-footed explorer among all these gigolos.” He had a taste for adventure, but had—as Anne Morrow Lindbergh astutely observed—to hurdle the “barriers of breeding, education, and delicatesse” in order to indulge it.
Still, there was the possibility he was making a mistake. He occasionally admitted to thinking himself idiotic for choosing the life he had. Why should he be sweating in the desert, in the land of eternal sand, “when in France there are good, green fields with streams and cows. And in Paris streets crowded with women. So sweet to touch. And the theater, music, pleasure?” Perhaps he was wrong to think that a life of risk counted for something more. After a time at Juby, these doubts plagued him less and less often, though on occasion he still needed to measure his world of high adventure against the potential of domestic bliss he had left behind. A little on the defensive, he responded to a Paris-based friend who had written to announce his impending marriage:
You’re engaged, you’re happy.… All that is sweet, fresh and calm. I receive your news with an eight-day beard, bare feet, black hands. I receive your letter after returning from adventures from which I shouldn’t have returned.… I’ve invited several Moorish chieftains over for tea. Here they are. They are greeting me hoarsely. Twenty kilometers from here I would hardly trust them. They are already regally settling on my chairs. I leave you; I return to my life. Your letter; what a breath of fresh air!
Within months of his arrival at Juby, Saint-Exupéry had reported to his mother that he had tamed a chameleon. “It is my role here to tame,” he continued. “It suits me, it’s a lovely word.” He moved on to gazelles, had less luck with a kind of desert sand fox, known as a fennec, which he attempted to domesticate for his sister. He was done in only by the Spaniards’ guard dog, who one night took a vicious interest in his shoulder. He had entirely grasped his mission vis-à-vis the Spanish, the Moors, and that desert; he had also found his calling. To tame (apprivoiser) would remain nearly a religious expression for Saint-Exupéry, who seemed to use the word in its larger sense for the first time on January 1, 1927, when he celebrated the New Year alone in an Alicante café. At 2:00 a.m. he sat down to write a letter, again to Renée de Saussine. He had been rejuvenated by a magical flight into the Spanish town and had caught its high spirits, though on paper his high spirits were often tempered with wistfulness. You have tamed me, he told her. “Frankly it’s sweet to let oneself be tamed. Only you will also cost me sad days.” It was a perfect vocation for a young nobleman: Saint-Exupéry described his work in the desert to his brother-in-law as one part aviator, one part ambassador, one part explorer. He had found a twentieth-century equivalent of the life of the troubador, the crusader, the knight-errant. He had, as he wrote his friend Charles Sallès, “tasted of the forbidden fruit … experienced the life of the gentilhomme de fortune.” He was, in spirit and in deed, a grand seigneur, and this entirely by virtue of his personality, even if it had been his name that had landed him in the desert in the first place. Mostly, however, he was remembered by the French mechanics for his kindness, his reserve, and his late-night exuberance, all of which contributed to make Juby a newly popular spot on the African run.
Saint-Exupéry’s technique in the desert was simple. He wasted no time in getting to know the nomads, something he had long wanted to do, though he had certainly never confessed as much to Didier Daurat. Within weeks of his arrival he was able to report that he was popular with the children of the desert, as he would be popular with children wherever he went; he was also taking Arabic lessons, though he was to be generally less successful with languages. He worked his diplomacy with a good deal of gracious mime and good humor. He offered teas to the chieftains, who reciprocated by inviting him a mile into the desert, to their tents, where no Spaniard had yet ventured. He was secure, he said, because the Moors were getting to know him, more accurately because they were impressed with his seeming fearlessness. He was earnestly fascinated with them, at least at first; they trusted him. In the words of Daurat, Saint-Exupéry’s “goodness, his rectitude, his respect for form, custom, and tradition meant he was considered and respected as a sage.” At the same time he was more than happy to invite the Spanish officers to the French barrack for dinner—even when, to the dismay of his colleagues, supplies were so low as to endanger the culinary reputation of the mother country—or to oblige them with a game of chess. He was accomplished at card tricks, which Juby allowed him time to perfect. He read a variety of technical manuals and took great pleasure in demonstrating his experiments, physical and metaphysical, for all concerned. He was, in short, a very capable ambassador. His success was immediate; within months of his arrival the Span flew the French flag along with their own at the passage of each air and the Moors ran to greet the “great white dervish.” Soon, too, required a title that fit. In early 1928 he proudly wrote his sister that the Moors had dubbed him “Captain of the Birds.”
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The Aéropostale pilots did not often dress as glamorously as we imagine; they were a motley crew who looked more like an assembly of Samuel Beckett characters than the leather-suited archangels of legend. Saint-Exupéry was no exception and shows up in photographs of Cape Juby in an odd assortment of clothes, usually mismatched and never particularly clean, sporting a wool scarf tied around his waist, a half-beard. He had come as far as one can from the “beau gigolo” of his letters. Evidently he took to wearing an old dressing gown that began to resemble a Moorish robe. Tanned and unshaved, he was virtually indistinguishable from the nomads. Henri Guillaumet, the pilot who would become Saint-Exupéry’s closest confidant on the airline, told of landing at Juby and being greeted by Saint-Exupéry, “strangely dressed in a seroual and a gandourah.” “What are you doing here?” asked Guillaumet, who had evidently not been informed of Saint-Exupéry’s new posting. “This is my home,” replied the new chief of the airfield, “and tonight you are my guest.”
Saint-Exupéry was himself welcomed to his new home by Toto Lauberg, a Toulousian mechanic famous as much for his devotion to la Ligne as that to red wine and Pernod, which he found in greater supply than water in the desert. At his side was his pet monkey, who had obligingly learned to share Toto’s tastes. “Say hello to the boss, ma cocotte,” Toto advised Kiki. Toto, who doubled as the Cape Juby cook, repaired the planes making stopovers at Juby; a second mechanic, Marchal, younger and sturdier, made repairs farther from home. Toto reminded Saint-Exupéry of a system the inhabitants of the barrack had ingeniously devised to discourage nighttime visitors; the Spanish relied on fortress walls, so well-guarded that Saint-Exupéry had once nearly met his death at the hands of an overzealous sentry, baffled by the presence of a non-Spanish-speaking caller during a late-night sandstorm. The French barrack counted on a magneto that, powered by a small propeller, electrified the door handle. Legend has it that Saint-Exupéry took note of the invention but forgot about it come morning, when he brusquely opened the door. The invention did fall out of use after his arrival; in Daurat’s words, at Juby “locks and bolts did not interest Saint-Exupéry much, as the magic of his own personality was enough to protect him.”
Dinners at Juby, which took place around a long wooden table bordered by a set of mismatched chairs, were nothing short of picturesque, even with the pet hyena banished to the outdoors because of the smell. Henry Delaunay, another Aéropostale pilot, left a priceless portrait of an evening when Juby hosted a full house. To the regulars were added Henri Guillaumet and René Riguelle, who had flown the Dakar mail north that afternoon, and Mermoz and Delaunay, who would continue with it to Casablanca the next morning. The reigning atmosphere was that of a boys’ dormitory: Mermoz, dressed only in pantaloons, sits handsomely in the corner, entirely engrossed in a crossword puzzle. Riguelle has tied the Juby dog to the slats of Me
rmoz’s chair, and waits for the meal that is about to appear, guaranteed to activate the hungry animal. Marchal, eager to set the prank in motion, is negotiating with Toto about the order of the courses, a subject about which Toto’s sense of propriety is not easily corrupted. Suddenly all attention is diverted by Kiki, who is noisily chomping on a razor blade. Every piece of fruit in sight is propelled in the monkey’s direction before Marchal can explain that this is the third time in the course of a week that the animal has worked her cleverness. Meanwhile Toto lobbies for everyone to convey his dinner requests to the Moor who has been recruited as maître d’hôtel. Attila speaks not a word of French, and swaddled in his blue veils looks better suited to do battle with a sandstorm than with a group of boisterous Frenchmen. Guillaumet scribbles word games on the tablecloth, delighting in tripping up Saint-Exupéry, who plays along with grudging humor and induces general hilarity when he finally informs Guillaumet: “This is id-i-ot-ic.” The evening draws to an end with Saint-Exupéry skillfully hypnotizing Toto while Delaunay tries not to think about what he will do the next morning if the fog rolls in as he follows Mermoz north, which it will.
