by Stacy Schiff
The trouble began not with Saint-Exupéry’s takeoff—miraculous, given the fact that a strong wind prevented him from taking off in the direction he had hoped, which had meant he had had to jump over three dunes, stalling each time, before flying out of the hollow—but with his subsequent arrival at Cisneros. Colonel de la Peña had already radioed the airfield in consternation; he had seen an airplane head south although no mail was scheduled until the following day. Paul Nubalde, a Cisneros mechanic, received his call with some surprise. As no French flights were scheduled for that Monday he took the liberty of telling the colonel that he must have been watching one of his own planes depart without realizing it. He then set off, along with the rest of the Cisneros crew, to scour the skies; someone was wrong, and they must have been eager for it to have been the Spaniard. To make matters worse, Saint-Exupéry had been misinformed about the whereabouts of Tête. The director arrived at Cisneros shortly before Saint-Exupéry and was on the runway to greet him, which he did not do cordially. The Juby chief was ordered back to his airfield with the two mail planes scheduled for the following morning.
Had he followed Tête’s orders, however, he would have missed his rendezvous in the desert two days off; it was perversely difficult to kill time, unnoticed, between Cisneros and Juby. Saint-Exupéry’s ingenuity here joined with his persuasiveness. He immediately confessed his plan to the mechanic Nubalde. Both men knew there was no spare aircraft at Cisneros; the mechanic conspired to make sure that the engine of Saint-Exupéry’s Breguet would not work in the morning. The northern mail came and went; the Juby pilot stayed, much to the fury of Tête. Nubalde pretended to work on the recalcitrant engine throughout the day, announcing success only in the evening. Saint-Exupéry took off—unescorted—the next morning at dawn.
Unfortunately, Nubalde’s efforts on Saint-Exupéry’s behalf were for nought. The Moor may or may not have made contact with the R’Guibat; he did see the mail planes heading north and set off all of his flares to attract their attention, evidently to no avail. By the time Saint-Exupéry came for him the Moor had no means of signaling his location; the pilot circled and circled without seeing a trace of his cohort. In his report Saint-Exupéry, of course, omitted the events following his arrival at Cisneros, contritely noting only that he had been informed by Tête that negotiations with the Moors were proceeding apace and in no way justified his “irregular conduct.” The remorse went only so far, however. He had also learned from Tête that—relations with the Spanish having become delicate over the Reine and Serre issue—his rashness might have jeopardized the whole operation. With a twelve-year-old’s logic Saint-Exupéry argued that Aéropostale had only to disclaim any responsibility for his flight. After all, he had acted without the company’s authorization, for which, he added, he had not asked so that it could not be refused. On arrival at Juby, he sent a telegram to Nubalde assuring him of his safe arrival but notifying him of the failure of his mission. From Cisneros a note went out from Tête to Toulouse, informing the head office that the director was issuing a formal order that Saint-Exupéry—“who had been carried away by his generous nature”—henceforth be told to stay put at Juby.
~
Saint-Exupéry had been scheduled to leave Cape Juby in September 1928, and he continued to count on a return as soon as Reine and Serre were released. He dreamed, as he had all along, of the luxuries of France, of a place “where one politely greets people when one meets them instead of firing at them, where one doesn’t get lost in the fog at 125 miles* an hour,” but he was more than ever firmly entrenched in his life of adventure. He wrote his mother that he hoped to be home in September but that it was his duty to stay so long as the situation remained unresolved. It seems his first use of the word that would prove so crucial to his texts and his thinking: “It may be,” he wrote, “that I’m actually good for something.”
He was more than good for something, as he would continue, despite Tête’s rebuke, to prove that fall. Another stellar rescue took place in October, when Saint-Exupéry came to the aid of a Spanish airplane shot down by the Moors 150 miles south of Juby. This time his bravado earned him accolades, not only because the venture had been successful. In the eyes of the company Saint-Exupéry had shown up the Spanish, who the French felt were proving the greatest obstacle to the liberation of the two hostages, now nearing the end of their 117 days in captivity. In his notes to Toulouse, which brim with frustration over the fate of Reine and Serre, Tête made a jubilant entry for October 18:
Two Spanish planes leave Juby on a reconnaissance mission, one breaks down, the pilot lands, damages the plane; the Moorish interpreter is badly hurt, the pilot wounded as well. The escort plane doesn’t dare land, returns to Juby. St Exupéry takes off to the rescue with a second Spanish plane. The second plane comes in to land. It crashes. St Exupéry executes an expert landing, brings back the two wounded men to Juby, takes off, and returns again with the second crew. What a lovely response to their authoritarian and petty attitude! I have instantly forgotten all the troubles that his adventure last month caused me. The lieutenant colonel had to write to the Company with his thanks!!!!
Saint-Exupéry had worked a certain amount of détente in the desert but it would have taken a miracle to eliminate the French-Spanish ill will of the 1920s. A game of chess between two aristocrats far from home was one thing, perfect trust between colonizing powers another, particularly since the Spanish could not help but be sorely aware of the French preeminence in northwest Africa. In a report on the Río de Oro filed after his return to France, Saint-Exupéry mentioned that he had been told point-blank by a Juby captain that the Spanish were disinclined to help the French, as every problem encountered by Aéropostale amounted to a boon to the projected Seville—Buenos Aires line. In the same report he vented some frustration with the Moors. His was perhaps a more anthropologically honest assessment of the nomads than the view shared by his colleagues, but it is not the romanticized picture later painted in Wind, Sand and Stars:
One does not pacify the nomads any more than one pacifies the international underworld; the same tribe can be friend or foe depending on the time, the place, the circumstances. Above all else the Moors admire force, and a conversation will influence them only insofar as it is an expression of power, even if that power is not put to use.… The family of emotions “gratitude, friendship, respect, etc.” on which a stable society is based lose their meaning when it comes to the nomads, whose social conditions have created a different spirit. It is absurd to expect gratitude from the Moors, as it would be absurd to condemn them for being ungrateful. The sentiment of gratitude in its European sense follows from a set of social conditions in which contacts and needs are permanent; a given nomadic tribe will have a very different need tomorrow from the one it has today.
Neither of these persistent difficulties minimized the importance of the Río de Oro for Saint-Exupéry, who had now spent over a year in the desert. During that time he had been groomed by adversity. He had made his first acquaintance with the ideas on which hang his books: the importance of responsibility, the fellowship it nurtures among men, the priority of an interior life. Thirteen years later, in New York, the celebrated author would be described as walking “with a lifting motion from the hips, as if he were on sand.” When he returned to France at the end of 1928 a whiff of exoticism clung to him. He was no longer an awkward loner with a name belied by his fingernails; he was Saint-Ex, whose legend preceded him. The myth-making machine of the airline went to work on him; by one of the more modest accounts, he had rescued fourteen aviators during his thirteen months at Juby. His own writing testifies to these efforts: in fourteen pages of Wind, Sand and Stars, he is forced down in the desert three times, although not all of these incidents took place during his stay at Cape Juby. And the derring-do went on until the last minute: His return to France was delayed by the fact that his replacement crashed in the fog en route for Juby. (“I am decidedly not lucky,” the outgoing chief of the airfield wrote h
is mother.) Louis Vidal had been flying toward Juby with the payroll for the African mail; instead of delivering the 20,000 francs, stolen by the Moors, he cost the company 22,600 francs in ransom and rescue fees.
Like all exiles, Saint-Exupéry was capable of a fierce amount of nostalgia, and a rosy glow soon settled on Cape Juby. In his last months in the Río de Oro he was apt to ridicule an outpost “where 200 men … live in a fort which they never leave”; within a year he lamented his former existence. For years he dined out on the accumulated tales of Juby as on his later tales of the desert, always with an emphasis on the drama, the foreignness, the tricks of nature, never on the heroics. He missed his monk’s life. The imagery of Cape Juby would color all of his work, though the images of Juby are not all indigenous to the Sahara. Southern Mad is a novel rich in flying gold and captive princesses and buried treasure and velvet and amber and pearls, items with which the desert is frugal. This “interior world of roses and fairies” was imported from another address; it sustained Saint-Exupéry in the desolation of Juby, it was the reason he understood the secret kingdom of the Moors, the treasure a man—any man, even a Senegalese slave—carried inside him. When Saint-Exupéry thought of exile he thought not of Juby, but of a home richer still in legend and mystery. His wooden barrack remained the home he most loved, but the home he most missed was a less modest one. He claimed it was more real than the solitude, the sandstorms, the blazing moonlight of the desert. Its vestibule alone, he wrote his mother, “is more mysterious than the heart of Africa.” It plays a role in Southern Mail and in The Little Prince; the first draft of Night Flight begins in it; it is described in some detail in Wind, Sand and Stars, when Saint-Exupéry has been forced down at night in the Río de Oro. Alone in the desert, he gives himself up to his memories:
Somewhere there was a park dark with firs and linden trees and an old house that I loved. It mattered little that it was far away, that it could not warm me in my flesh, nor shelter me … It was enough that it existed to fill my night with its presence. I was no longer this body, flung up on a shore; I oriented myself; I was the child of this house.
* In fact, the entire Western Sahara boasts not a single oasis or lake; the only mineral in which the region is rich is phosphate.
* If Saint-Exupéry managed to pilot a Breguet 14 at 125 miles an hour, he did so with a very stiff wind behind him. Cruising speeds were closer to 80 to 100 miles an hour.
II
~
The Mother Country
1900–1909
For the French, all children are barbarians who must be tamed and molded ruthlessly to adult standards.
JESSE R. PITTS, In Search of France
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was born on the morning of June 29, 1900, at 8, rue du Peyrat, Lyons. He was baptized the following day as Antoine Jean-Baptiste Marie Roger de Saint-Exupéry; to his family he was Tonio. He would claim that it was entirely by accident that he was born in Lyons—neither of his parents was Lyonnais and the family spent little time there—and the city seems to have heard his protests. It is discreet about the birth of its famous son, commemorated only by a plaque over the entryway to the townhouse on what is now the rue Alphonse Fochier and in no imminent danger of being renamed. Saint-Exupéry would take little from France’s second city, save for a Rabelaisian appetite for good food and a love-hate relationship with France’s premier city. In a country in which Paris provides the measure of all things—in which distances are measured from a small stone sunk into the pavement in front of the portals of Notre Dame—Lyons remains proud of its provinciality. Ultimately it mattered less that Saint-Exupéry was from Lyons than that he was not from Paris.
His parents were both members of the provincial nobility, a class the Parisian nobility had dubbed les hobereaux in honor of a small falcon that hunts only small prey. The term was accurate in its suggestion that the respect accorded the provincial nobleman by his fellow townsmen was inversely proportional to the respect accorded him by the titled Parisian, who now tended his cave but who left the care of his vineyards to others. The Saint-Exupéry family, one of France’s oldest, dating back to the Crusades, came from the Limousin, in central France; Saint-Exupéry’s paternal grandfather had married Alix Blouquier de Trélan, whose family was based in Tours. The Boyer de Fonscolombes, Saint-Exupéry’s mother’s family, hailed from Aix-en-Provence on the paternal side. Her mother’s family, the Romanet de Lestranges, were also southerners, hailing from the Vivarais, now the Ardèche, in southeastern France. There were titles and châteaux and—less often—fortunes on both sides; Saint-Exupéry’s paternal grandfather was a count and his maternal grandfather a baron. The genealogical details appeared to matter little to the aviator, who did not dwell on the glories of France’s past except to explain the ills of the present, and then only in a most general way. (In one of the rare lines of his work in which he harks back to his ancestors he vaunts not the achievements of the family but the unaffected prose of his great-grandfather’s cook.) He was, however, distinctly in possession of “un joli nom.” On his father’s side he could count one member of the Académie Française and a host of distinguished military officers; his grandfather’s grandfather had fought with Lafayette in America. Among his maternal ancestors he could claim an archbishop, a court chamberlain, several distinguished musicians, and a number of knights. Saint-Exupéry had his favorites in the family and relied heavily on the emotional and material support they came to offer him, but he did not view blood relation as a condition in itself sufficient to merit affection or even, much to his mother’s dismay, civility. From his father’s side he inherited a “marvelous gaiety” and much charm; from his mother’s came an appreciation of things musical, artistic, and spiritual, along with the sensibility to match.
Jean de Saint-Exupéry, whom his son resembled physically and from whom he inherited his height, was born in 1863 in Florac, where Saint-Exupéry’s grandfather, Fernand, was then sous-préfet. Later the family of nine settled in Le Mans, where Fernand de Saint-Exupéry joined an insurance company; it may not have been the obvious choice of profession for a count who had served as sous-préfet in four different départements, but it was a stable one, particularly in the post-1870, newly democratic world. Fernand de Saint-Exupéry appears to have recommended the profession to Jean, who began but did not finish his schooling as a military officer—a sin for which a younger brother later atoned—and who turned up in Lyons as an inspector for the Compagnie du Soleil in 1896. It says a good deal about the time in which he was born that on Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s birth certificate his father—then covering the company’s affairs in two regions—described himself as being “sans profession.“
Jean de Saint-Exupéry probably met Marie Boyer de Fonscolombe, twelve years his junior, in Lyons the year of his arrival there. The two were distantly related and were introduced at the apartment of the Countess de Tricaud, Marie’s great-aunt and godmother, who was to play a crucial role in the young family’s life. By 1896 the countess, born Gabrielle de Lestrange, was sixty-three; she had long lost her husband and their only daughter, who had died before her fourth birthday in 1869. The Count de Tricaud had left his widow a fashionable apartment overlooking the central place of Lyons, where she installed herself during the winter months. Perhaps more dear to her was the château she had inherited forty-five miles northeast of the city, where on June 8, 1896, Jean de Saint-Exupéry and Marie de Fonscolombe were married. By January 1897 the couple had settled on the rue du Peyrat and produced their first daughter, Marie-Madeleine. A second daughter, Simone, the obvious candidate for the distinction of the Saint-Exupéry most likely to succeed, was born a year and a day later, on January 26, 1898. These two girls constituted the “elders” of the family. Antoine’s birth in 1900 was followed by that of a second son, François, in 1902, and by that of a third daughter, Gabrielle, Saint-Exupéry’s favorite sister, known as Didi, in May 1903.
The family was no sooner complete when, on the evening of March 14, 19
04, Jean de Saint-Exupéry suffered a stroke in the waiting room of the train station near the home of his wife’s family. He was forty-one years old. A doctor arrived minutes after his collapse but was unable to revive the young man; Jean de Saint-Exupéry received his last rites in the arms of his wife, in the La Foux station, as an eastbound train discharged its passengers. His children were not on hand at the time; it is unclear how the news was conveyed to them. Antoine was not yet four; his life was to be shaped to a remarkable extent by an event he may not have remembered. From this age on the preponderant influence on him would be a feminine one: the Countess de Tricaud, herself an expert at loss, rallied to the side of Marie de Saint-Exupéry, now a twenty-eight-year-old widow and mother of five with no fixed source of income. The apartment on the rue du Peyrat was abandoned and the family took to spending six months of the year at the countess’s château at Saint-Maurice-de-Rémens, where they would almost certainly not have been installed had Jean de Saint-Exupéry lived on. The rest of the year they invaded the countess’s Lyons apartment on the Place Bellecour or stayed with Marie de Saint-Exupéry’s parents at the château de La Mole, a converted monastery with two medieval towers and its own tropical forest, near Saint-Tropez. The château had been in the family since 1770; it was here that Jean de Saint-Exupéry’s funeral was held.
Marie de Saint-Exupéry acquitted herself of her familial responsibilities with grace and tenderness. She was a devoted mother who would remain unceasingly compassionate, attentive, giving, and pious, all qualities her elder son would put to the test. She was not always approving, which meant only that her blessing carried great weight. Her husband’s death made her presence doubly felt, which had on Antoine an effect that defies the laws of physics: he could not get enough of her. Absent fathers can be oddly present, too, and Jean de Saint-Exupéry’s shadow was long. His son never wrote about the loss of his father—although his oeuvre can be read as a requiem to the male bonds of which he was deprived—and seems not to have spoken of him. If he did not cave in to regret on this subject he did, however, do battle with a very private anxiety. He thought his father had died of syphilis, and he believed the disease to be hereditary. His was not a far-fetched idea at a time when the illness—which Flaubert had defined in his Dictionary of Received Ideas as something by which more or less everybody was affected—accounted for some 15 percent of all deaths. Still, this was not the kind of concern with which it is safe to saddle a man with a prodigious imagination.
