Saint-exupery: A Biography

by Stacy Schiff

  Minutes after takeoff Bourgat’s Breguet developed an oil leak. He turned to land next to Riguelle’s plane, where the interpreter must have been surprised to see that he was to have company after all. Lefèbvre’s report was this time less dire. The oil lines would have to be replaced, for which he estimated a repair time of three to four hours. A sign was made to Saint-Exupéry that he should land as well, which he did. The interpreters were dispatched as lookouts; as it was by now at least mid-afternoon, Tête and Riguelle set about preparing a campsite for the evening. The Breguet 14 was an unreliable aircraft, but a case where three planes set off and none reached its destination was rare all the same. Saint-Exupéry and Bourgat helped Lefèbvre to install the oil lines from Riguelle’s plane in Bourgat’s, an operation that would have been hugely facilitated by the presence of a stepladder. The operation finished, Saint-Exupéry performed a run-up, running the engine at full power without taking off. By now it was nearly dusk; all seemed in order for a dawn departure. Happily the provisions were more reliable than the aircraft; from the first-rate reserves Tête and Riguelle set out a modest dinner of white ham, pâté de foie, sardines, and pâté au fromage. Lefèbvre noted that the forlorn eight had no grounds on which to claim martyrdom as they had been stranded as well with several excellent bottles of wine.

  It was by no account—and Saint-Exupéry’s and Lefèbvre’s recollections vary mainly in their rhapsodies—a sad evening. The mechanic remembered that the group “did the reserves honor, no one having lost his appetite” in all the drama, traded anecdotes, and played several games of belote. Saint-Exupéry then entertained the group with his magnificent card tricks, “happy as a child to demonstrate for us his talents as a conjurer.” This night deep in dissident territory would indeed be remembered as an emblematic one by Saint-Exupéry, who generally got a good deal of literary mileage out of his misadventures. Here is his description of the evening in the passage that lent Wind, Sand and Stars its name:

  We unloaded five or six wooden cases of merchandise out of the hold, emptied them, and set them about in a circle. At the deep end of each case, as in a sentry-box, we set a lighted candle, its flame poorly sheltered from the wind. So in the heart of the desert, on the naked rind of the planet, in an isolation like that of the beginnings of the world, we built a village of men. Sitting in the flickering light of the candles on this kerchief of sand, on this village square, we waited in the night. We were waiting for the rescuing dawn—or for the Moors. Something, I know not what, lent this night a savor of Christmas. We told stories, we joked, we sang songs. In the air there was that slight fever that reigns over a gaily prepared feast. And yet we were infinitely poor. Wind, sand, and stars. The austerity of Trappists. But on this badly lighted cloth, a handful of men who possessed nothing in the world but their memories were sharing invisible riches. We had met at last. Men travel side by side for years, each locked up in his own silence or exchanging those words which carry no freight—till danger comes. Then they stand shoulder to shoulder.

  Saint-Exupéry took a few artistic liberties with his account. When he first wrote up the evening for Paris-Soir, exactly ten years after it had happened, he mentioned that several aviators had been murdered by the Moors in the desert. By 1939, they had been murdered “exactly on the spot” on which the French now camped. He perhaps overstated the danger—Lefèbvre mentions only that the French were armed—but more indicative were the practical details he left out surrounding this transcendent evening. According to Lefèbvre, it was mostly Saint-Exupéry who talked and joked and sang, exercising a kind of magical fascination over his comrades. He carried on all night, possibly because he was happy, possibly to make the others forget the cold, probably both. First he spoke with great excitement of several Jules Verne-ish contraptions he had invented; he went on to suggest that Toulouse equip the Aéropostale planes with donkeys, convinced these animals would intimidate both the Moors and their camels. Ultimately he discoursed on the nature of existence itself. Clearly he could not have described the evening more accurately than he did, having been the magic at the center of it.

  At a certain point even Saint-Exupéry’s charms could not keep the group from sleep. It was decided that the mail trunks, suspended from the planes’ wings, offered the best protection from the wind and the cold. They did for everyone but Saint-Exupéry who—despite numerous contortions—could not fold himself into a trunk and resolved instead to spend the night in an open cockpit. This arrangement did not last long, given the temperature, which could have fallen below thirty-five degrees and for which the Frenchmen were certainly unprepared. According to Lefèbvre, who could not have been very comfortably installed in his trunk if he were able to report as much, Saint-Exupéry got out of the Breguet toward 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. “Covering himself with everything he could find in the baggage compartments, he walked in circles around the planes, like a ghost, attempting to keep warm.… In those moments when it would have been normal to give in to despair he seemed to experience extreme exaltation, intense happiness, before which our solitude in the immensity of the desert made him appreciate not only his craft as a pilot, but everything which among men elicited his love and admiration,” Lefèbvre nearly prophetically observed. When the others woke, Saint-Exupéry went on at some length about the remarkable opportunity he had had to admire the North Star. His exuberance must have been infuriating, as Riguelle was quick to let him know: “The North Star,” he informed the Juby chief, “has never been worth a few good hours of sleep.” Two hours later the six Frenchmen arrived in Cisneros in two cramped planes; the interpreters were left for another night in the desert. A flurry of telegrams went out from Cisneros, assuring the airfields up and down the coast that the week had not, as feared, claimed any additional casualties.

  That day the governor of Cisneros received a letter from Reine and Serre via a Moorish emissary. The fog had forced them to fly just above the ground on June 30, and a dune had knocked them out of the air about halfway between Juby and Villa Cisneros. Three hours later they had been taken prisoner by the R’Guibat, the most hostile of the tribes in the Río de Oro. An aerial search for their plane would have been futile; the R’Guibat had destroyed what they could of the 1,500-pound Latécoère. They had pulled apart Serre’s luggage, evidently taking a special interest in his toiletries. Having elicited mimed explanations of each item they doused themselves in eau de cologne; it was a mild replay of a 1926 incident in which the Moors, fascinated by a first-aid kit, had downed a mixture of antigangrene and antitetanus serums, rubbing alcohol, and iodine salve, a potion that—fortunately for the French—claimed no casualties. Reine and Serre had fared better than their baggage and were intact. Naturally a ransom was proposed: the price of the two Frenchmen was one million camels, one million rifles, and the liberation of all R’Guibat prisoners—“a little nothing,” Saint-Exupéry wrote his mother. The following morning he flew north to Juby and the others south to Port-Étienne. Lefèbvre, Riguelle, and Bourgat made a detour to pay their last respects to Riguelle’s Breguet. Twenty-four hours after their departure, it had already been torn to pieces.

  ~

  “At times like these,” Saint-Exupéry wrote his mother that summer, “one risks one’s life with a great deal of generosity.” If anything, the Aéropostale management might have wished him to be less magnanimous in 1928. As summer wore on the mishaps multiplied, and as they did the man who would make a cult of adversity thrived. Reine and Serre were in their third week of captivity when, on July 18, a second team of aviators went down between Villa Cisneros and Juby. This time it was the escort plane that made an emergency landing south of Juby; it was piloted by Riguelle, who had as much bad luck as anyone could with the Breguet 14. Maurice Dumesnil flew on to Juby with the mail and the bad news, not having seen a suitable landing place next to Riguelle and not having wanted to risk damage to both aircraft in one of the most sensitive areas of the desert. On alerting Saint-Exupéry he took off again for Riguelle, who was only twenty mi
les from the fort. Either at this time or as the next set of aviators went down, as they did with stunning regularity over these months, Saint-Exupéry wrote home to tell of the magnificent feats being performed in the desert to rescue the mails. He had, he reported, covered 5,000 miles of the desert in five days. He had been fired at like a rabbit by razzias of 300 men; he had had some hair-raising adventures and—aside from his evening spent admiring the North Star—had landed four times in dissident territory. “I have never,” he told his mother, “so often landed or slept in the Sahara, nor heard so many bullets fly.”

  Now he set about organizing the rescue of Riguelle’s plane. It could not be transported back to the airfield over land, where no trail cut through the dunes, or by sea, because of the shoreline cliffs; Saint-Exupéry needed to fly the Breguet out of the desert as quickly as possible. Immediately he set out for the site with several Moors who had agreed to guard the machine; in the air, he passed Riguelle and Dumesnil, returning to the safety of Juby. His delight in seeing them must have been tempered with his distress at seeing the aircraft. It was only a twenty-minute flight from Juby but the Breguet required a good deal of repair. Regulations would have stipulated that it remain in the desert; Saint-Exupéry would consider no such thing. Happily he got on better with the Moors than with the rules, and on his return, evidently set off to consult with the chiefs camped in the vicinity. Sporting his famous bathrobe, he talked of the wind and the weather, downed the requisite three cups of tea, then politely asked for an escort, which—at a price and after some negotiation—was granted.

  Over the course of the next two days he managed to organize a caravan of six armed Moors on horseback; nine workers on foot; two horses, one for the mechanic Marchal and one for himself; two mules, carrying supplies and water; one camel carrying tools; and two additional camels pulling a cart mounted on airplane wheels. This invention of Saint-Exupéry’s on which rode an airplane engine, a hoist, and a sawhorse, maneuvered its way nicely over the dunes; it had evidently been the subject of some derision at Juby, and Saint-Exupéry was particularly pleased by its performance. Later he could not restrain himself from adding an aside in his official report to Toulouse: “This is the first time, at least in the Sahara, that the camel has been used as a draft animal.” This unusual caravan set out to the south in the evening, reaching its destination on the morning of July 21. The Juby chief could not have been pleased to find the aircraft more damaged than when he had left it; the Moors he had stationed next to the plane had either deserted or been scared away, and the Breguet had been sabotaged. Its piston rod, he now noticed, had entirely sliced the engine struts, which meant that new struts would be needed. Moreover, it did not look as if it would be possible to drag the Breguet to a smoother piece of ground, as he had intended. By camel he sent orders back to Juby for a mechanic to disassemble several struts; Marchal set about removing those of the wrecked plane. In the meantime, all hands were put to work on an improvised runway, a project that took the better part of the next two days. Saint-Exupéry reported that he put in a certain amount of time with a pickax and shovel himself. Here his love of technical manuals served him well. As the sand was soft he was not sure that he would actually be able to take off from the runway without some sort of added lift. He had a springboard of hard-packed sand built at the end of the strip, which he could approach at high speed. The plane would either trampoline into the air or sink if it could not attain sufficient air speed. In the event of the latter, Saint-Exupéry constructed a sort of platform sixty feet farther on, from which the plane would rebound or—in a worst-case scenario—crash, but without any real danger to its pilot. These arrangements he did not mention in his report to the company.

  By nightfall the cameleer returned from Juby, engine mounts in tow. He was preceded by the sound of gunshots in the distance, which had sent the Moors racing for their guns. Toward midnight an Izarguin messenger galloped into the camp with the news that the bloodthirsty Ait-Toussa would be upon them in minutes and that they would be killed; by order of Colonel de la Peña, the men were to return to Juby. Instantly they were off for the fort, the lucky ones three to a camel. Nine miles into the retreat Saint-Exupéry learned that the alarm had not been sounded by the colonel but by the kindhearted messenger himself. Furious, he ordered a return to the half-built runway. This idea roundly displeased the Moors. Ataf, his interpreter, informed him that he would be in great trouble if he failed to prevent any further French deaths; what was more, the Ait-Toussa could be counted on to kill everyone, which Ataf admitted was to him cause for greater concern. Saint-Exupéry had his fair share of coaxing to do; he appears to have successfully insulted the Moors along with accusations of cowardice. His was by no means a euphoric evening under the stars. At 9:00 a.m., with order restored and work again under way, two Spanish planes flew overhead and delivered an official order from the colonel that Saint-Exupéry retreat. “I folded this paper carefully, as a souvenir, and decided to head back, but by plane, that evening,” he reported later.

  By noon the work was accompanied by a symphony of not-so-distant gunfire; the Moors had an understandable tendency to flatten to the ground every time a new series of shots rang out. Only late in the afternoon were the new engine mounted and the runway ready; Marchal had not had an easy time fitting the engine, and Saint-Exupéry admitted that “the name of God was compromised a certain number of times in the course of this adventure.” At six he took off with Marchal for Juby. It was “a technically perfect takeoff from the spring-board, followed by an equally perfect landing at Juby,” he reported privately. He allowed a touch of humor but no pride to creep into his official report, aside from the camels-as-draft-animals boast: the expenses, he explained, “come in a lump sum because (1) There were no bills and; (2) They are extremely muddled, having resulted from interminable discussions and complications.” With fetching understatement he added, “I can’t judge if the cost of this expedition is exaggerated, it being without precedent.” When reporting back to Albert Tête he seemed well aware that the exploit would also remain without successor: “Don’t reproach me this rescue, because it was reasonable to attempt it. If we stayed with the plane it was out of simple elegance. It’s none of the company’s business.”

  There was no question that Saint-Exupéry was, as one mechanic reported, particularly delighted by this rescue, which showed him to possess as much cleverness as courage. Legend soon had him stepping on the gas on his makeshift runway as blue turbans appeared on the horizon, performing aerobatics over Juby in Riguelle’s plane until he remembered that Marchal had fit the engine to the plane with only four of its twenty-four bolts. It is easier to believe the legend that had him asleep at the Juby dinner table within minutes. Probably the most difficult part of the adventure was the drafting of the official report, which he filed on August 1, a week after his return. “Saint-Exupéry was never so unhappy, his forehead as wrinkled, than when he had to write an official report; he could not hold in his cutting, throwaway remarks, so lively was his intelligence,” remembered Lefèbvre. The responsibility on which the Juby chief flourished was of the abstract and all-consuming variety. His bête noire would prove the administrative, the formulaic, that which obliged him to fold his odd, large frame into the confines of a box or a line or a category. The frustration that would lead him to exact his revenge—against small-minded inspectors, in Night Flight; against the sedentary, in Wind, Sand and Stars; against the politicians, in Flight to Arras; against bureaucrats, academics, businessmen in The Little Prince—was brewing already at his desk at Juby. He was turning out to be the living incarnation of two great French concepts: that of esprit de corps, which explained his new confidence in himself, and of which he would become one of the great literary spokesmen; and the spirit of noblesse oblige, which would separate him from it all, which would aggravate his impatience with the administrative demands of the company. The two made for a difficult balancing act.

  This Saint-Exupéry amply demonstrated with
a rogue attempt to rescue Reine and Serre, still held captive, on September 17. The aviators, who were being held separately, had talked in their letters of imminent assassination; all attempts to rescue them or to negotiate a rescue had proved futile. Through his contacts with the Moors Saint-Exupéry had on occasion learned their whereabouts (the prisoners were moved constantly) and he had several times managed to deliver food and clothing to them. This time, having assured himself that Tête would not be at Cisneros, he made an unauthorized trip south, stopping in a hollow among the interior cliffs where he dropped off a Moor with a few days’ worth of rations and water. The Moor was to approach the R’Guibat, attempt to negotiate a reasonable ransom, then rendezvous with the pilot in the same place three days later. From his own pocket Saint-Exupéry furnished his accomplice the sum necessary for the purchase of two camels, with which he could make his expedition to the R’Guibat camp.