Saint-exupery: A Biography

by Stacy Schiff

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  It was at the château of Saint-Maurice-de-Rémens that Saint-Exupéry located his childhood. The house was dear enough to the family that when Simone de Saint-Exupéry was prohibited by her more famous brother from bringing out a collection of stories under the family name she published instead as Simone de Remens. Here was the “park dark with firs and lindens,” here was the “secret kingdom,” the “interior world of roses and fairies.” Such enchantment might not have been obvious to the uninitiated. The château, a handsome Louis XVI building, then a train and carriage ride from Lyons, had been purchased for the Count and Countess de Tricaud in the early 1850s and decorated by them in Second Empire splendor, the style of the day. Its rooms were stately and dark, the long front hallway paneled and cold and cavelike. To the right wing of the house, which looks out over rolling foothills, the Tricauds had added a chapel, in which were housed the remains of their daughter. Behind the château lay a handsome, linden-lined park. The countess had entertained both sides of her family—the Fonscolombes and the Lestranges—at Saint-Maurice; Madame de Saint-Exupéry had long been made to feel at home here. Now the house was opened to her “tribe” just before Easter and served as the Saint-Exupérys’ base of operations until October. Madame de Saint-Exupéry and her elder daughters made their home on the ground floor; the third was the province of the younger children and their governess, who for two very memorable years was an Austrian named Paula. It was not long before the power of Antoine’s personality made itself felt: grills were placed over the third-floor windows to prevent nighttime excursions on the roof. From that floor came the continual sound of stampedes, especially at bathtime, when Paula or one of her successors, sponge in hand, was obliged to do her best to outrun a screaming, naked Tonio.

  The child whose full head of golden curls had earned him the nickname “the Sun King” was in fact happily attempting his first experiments with absolute power. He had a throne of his own, a miniature green chair very dear to him. He quickly distinguished himself with his exigence, making his mother the primary target of his tyranny: “He followed me throughout the house like a shadow, his little lacquered chair in hand, so that he might sit down at my side wherever I was.” He was in quest of a story and would not release his mother until one was delivered. Madame de Saint-Exupéry encouraged her children to dramatize the many tales she told them with tableaux vivants or with charades; she saw to it that her sons, at least, were steeped in Jules Verne and Hans Christian Andersen. As a consequence the Saint-Exupéry children were committed litterateurs early on; Saint-Exupéry claimed to have written poetry from the age of six. Three would go on to publish, though none was quite so demanding of his first audiences as Antoine, who would beat François if his younger brother refused to listen to his work. At a cousin’s home he and his sister Simone proved accomplished metteurs en scène; they composed short plays based on the tales they unearthed in their uncle’s library, where they fell greedily upon all history books, memoirs, and adventure stories. These plays were performed with the assistance of numerous cousins, to the general delight of the assembled adults. Saint-Exupéry took this encouragement to its logical extreme. He wrote his poems mostly at night, when he prowled the house in search of an audience. Draped in a blanket or a tablecloth, he routinely woke his brother and sisters for dramatic readings of his newly minted verse. His protesting siblings in tow, he then led the way to Madame de Saint-Exupéry’s room, where he would light a lamp and energetically repeat his performance, often prevailing until 1:00 a.m. His explanation for these intrusions was simple: “When you are awakened abruptly in such a way, you have a much greater clearness of mind,” he informed his mother. Later in life, when he had to cross the city of Paris or dial an international number to deprive a friend of a night’s sleep, he offered no such excuse.

  His passions were not entirely literary, and his victims not exclusively members of the family. Anne-Marie Poncet, whose father directed the Lyons Opéra, made the trip to Saint-Maurice weekly to give the Saint-Exupéry children piano and singing lessons. One day she was asked repeatedly if she knew how a piston worked. She was finally obliged to banish the aspiring mechanic with a stern “Enough, Tonio, you’re boring us.” The opinion of Father Montessuy, the curé who visited Saint-Maurice every other day and returned the family’s hospitality by consistently bettering them at the bridge table, carried great weight in the household; he in particular was not spared Tonio’s enthusiasms. After having been assailed one evening by the twelve-year-old regarding his design for a motor for a flying bicycle, he slunk off to the card table with the reassuring news that “Antoine is extraordinarily talented in the sciences.” His pronouncement gave the young inventor license; he was allowed to continue designing the contraption, for which he claimed he needed a small hot-oil motor. A search was made in the village and Tonio ultimately came to possess the coveted item, which he lovingly tuned and fondled for hours. “The bizarre object which vaguely resembled an octopus shorn of several tentacles” came to an untimely end, however: it exploded in François’s face one afternoon and was confiscated.

  Undaunted, the young engineer continued on with his design for a flying bicycle, a logical enough hybrid given that it had only been twenty years since the Prince de Sagan had begun a rage by pedaling through the Bois de Boulogne on a “little steel fairy” and nine since the Wright brothers had taken to the skies. Saint-Exupéry mounted a set of old sheets to a bicycle with wicker supports designed by the village carpenter but did not manage—even with the assistance of a steep ramp and, as one eyewitness remembered, with a good deal of frenzied pedaling—to take to the air. (His was not an entirely senseless exercise; nine years later a Frenchman in fact sailed forty feet through the air on a bicycle with wings and no propeller.) In his late twenties, when Saint-Exupéry flew aircraft not too much more complicated than the one he had designed, he would visit Saint-Maurice on leave and install himself at the side of Marguerite Chapeys, known as Moisie, in the sewing room. There he would harangue the devoted housekeeper, who had arrived in 1914 when the house’s German staff was replaced, with tales of the labors from which he had just returned. In Wind, Sand and Stars he recorded her disappointing reaction: “You would say that I hadn’t changed a whit. Already as a child I had torn my shirts—’How terrible!’—and skinned my knees, coming home as day fell to be bandaged. No, Mademoiselle, no! I have not come back from the other end of the park but from the other end of the world! … ‘Of course!’ you would say. ‘Boys will run about, break their bones, and think themselves great fellows!’ ” (A village child remembered Tonio exactly as he described himself, always sporting at least one bandage.) His sister Simone remembered her brother’s sessions with their housekeeper differently: the young aviator was enough his former self that he enjoyed tormenting the delicate Moisie with his tales of dissident landings. “Imaginative and willful, Antoine always got his way,” she said, all evidence on her side.

  Flying bicycles come naturally to twelve-year-old boys, but generally speaking Saint-Exupéry’s childhood obsessions did correspond remarkably both to his time and to his adult fixations. In the year of his birth—when the only Frenchman to have flown had done so in what was known as a “mechanical bat”—Marconi’s telegraph, X-rays, and intercity telephones were introduced at the Paris World’s Fair, the first to display a wide selection of bicycles and automobiles. Before its disappearance, Antoine’s cherished motor had been rigged up to power an irrigation system on which François half-willingly collaborated, the object of which was to plant vegetables to sell to Tante Tricaud at an inflated price. The enterprise ended when the motor exploded and was confiscated, though the failure of the venture did not prevent Saint-Exupéry from informing a cousin that they would all one day be gardeners, and though later in life he would repeatedly claim gardening as his true calling. Horticultural images proliferate in his writing; the highest compliment he could pay a woman was to compare her presence to a green field or a bed of flowe
rs or a well-tended garden, something of an irony for a man who attempted to spend as little time as possible on the earth, and who by his twenties had developed a fierce allergy to lindens.

  For animals the Saint-Exupéry children shared a collective passion, one that was not altogether reciprocated. The swallow fallen from its nest and coaxed to recovery on a diet of wine-soaked bread died of indigestion. The field mice of Saint-Maurice preferred their liberty to a generously stocked larder. The tamed crickets languished and died in their cardboard homes; they were diagnosed as suffering from thirst and carefully soaked in water. The snails of Saint-Maurice showed little interest in the dirt homes designed for them; those that had been trained for a race to commemorate Madame de Saint-Exupéry’s birthday one year refused to budge from the starting line, probably because they had been dyed different colors for the tournament and been asphyxiated by the paint. Paula was one of the rare readers of The Little Prince who was not surprised by its author’s atypical offering: the book greatly reminded her of Antoine’s childhood ideas. “He often asked me to tell him what I had done when I had been a lion, an elephant, a monkey. He listened attentively to my tales of life as a wild beast.” She remembered the walks she had taken with the Saint-Exupéry children at the château de La Mole, accompanied by their aunt Madeleine de Fonscolombe’s cat, her dogs, and several turtles on leashes.

  In his habits, too, Saint-Exupéry the child was a small and perfect advertisement for Saint-Exupéry the man. His celebrated ardor did not desert him at mealtime. One day after a walk in the mountains he sat down at the lunch table to admit contritely that he had just made a feast of four raw eggs at the home of the gardener. His appetite seemed to undermine the confession. Earlier the three youngest children had taken their meals in the kitchen with their governess, a measure that did not prevent the digestion of the adults next door from being troubled by piercing shrieks of “No carrots!” (Years later Saint-Exupéry informed one of his sisters that she did not love him anymore; in an act he considered treasonous she had served him green beans, which he detested.) His room was kept always in a perfect state of disorder, one with which only Gabrielle was authorized to tamper. Simone remembered this having been the case because the household staff refused the job. Her brother filed his papers away in a little velvet-lined trunk; only when it would no longer close would he begin to think of resigning himself to the necessary triage. He was happy when able to sit with these precious documents displayed all around him, more or less obliterating the floor of his room.

  He was not much impressed by discipline. On the rare occasion when his mother lost her patience she would spank her son with a slipper or threaten him with a more austere goûter [afternoon snack] than he was used to. One method could be counted upon to keep the boisterous child tranquil: an aunt remembered having asked Antoine to feed a bottle of milk to an infant cousin, a task of which he acquitted himself with “an infinite gentleness.” For one hour, not a sound was heard from either party. Outside of that, the aunt admitted, “He was a first-rate devil.” According to his mother, however, he was as dreamy and sensitive as he was turbulent. The greatest hardship he could imagine—this before the world had yet heard of Combray—was to be put to bed without a goodnight kiss, about which he would rhapsodize later: “Mother, you leaned over us, presiding over this flight of your angels; and so that our trip would be safe, so that nothing dared to disturb our dreams, you smoothed every wrinkle, every crease, every swell of the covers.” He was as thin-skinned as he was dictatorial, domineering, in regular need of approbation and understanding. For this he looked to his mother. Arguably more than any other woman in his life, she provided it.

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  Marie de Saint-Exupéry was the incarnation of what we have come to think of as the archetypal mother: she was all solicitude and sympathy; her wisdoms were of the reason-transcending kind; hers was a cherishing, nourishing, sustaining goodness. Even when the fame of her elder son eclipsed the successes of her other children she refused to divide her loyalties: “Antoine was talented, of course, but all of my children were talented. I can’t say that I noticed, when they were younger, that Antoine was more so than the others.” The daughter and granddaughter of composers, she was herself an accomplished musician who played the harmonium in the village church every Sunday. It appears to have been she, with her trained contralto voice, who began to fill the château of Saint-Maurice with music. André de Fonscolombe, a son of her brother who was nine years Antoine’s junior, was struck by the “profound musical ambiance” of Saint-Maurice, where he also vacationed: “The house resonated with melodies of Reynaldo Hahn, Fauré, Schumann, Schubert or Massenet.” Under Marie de Saint-Exupéry’s direction the children formed a choir; they were taught a host of songs from the Middle Ages that formed the core of Saint-Exupéry’s repertoire and were later performed in places his mother could not have imagined.

  A talented pastelist, Marie de Saint-Exupéry painted all her life; in 1929, as Night Flight was being reviewed, she sold three paintings to the city of Lyons, causing her son to remark proudly, “What a family we are!” In 1967, at the age of ninety-two, she published a book of poems, her second, mostly about her children and also about the years at Saint-Maurice. Her sensibility is uncannily similar to her son’s. In one piece, entitled “Deception,” she writes of her childhood disappointment when, in 1881, two “princes”—in fact the Duc de Chartres and the Comte de Paris—come to dinner. After days of anticipation she is forced to concede that there is nothing particularly remarkable about the visitors: “What? This man, a prince? This man who looks like a nobody! I’m very tempted to stick my tongue out at him!” Her wariness of convention was not her only legacy to her son. One of her nieces remembered her as utterly charming but often vague: “She sent delightful but sometimes imprecise letters.… Sending on news of a new baby of Gabrielle’s she wrote: ‘Didi has just had a little marvel,’ without specifying whether it was a boy or a girl. She had no concept of exactitude.” She was also hopelessly out of her element with financial affairs, not surprising in a woman who had married at twenty-one, was left alone with five children eight years later, appreciated well-made dresses, and had not been raised in a milieu in which women concerned themselves with the family accounts in the first place.

  For the most part Marie de Saint-Exupéry was at the mercy, financially and geographically, of the family’s kindnesses, even if—despite occasional sagging spirits—she never comported herself as such. She was not always in good health, although in the end she outlived all but two of her children. In March 1913 she took her two sons to the north of France for ten days to stay with a childhood friend who was herself widowed and the mother of four. The Countess du Mesnil du Buisson noted in her daybook that Madame de Saint-Exupéry was having trouble both with her eyes and her legs. The trip—which included a pilgrimage to Mont Saint-Michel—was deemed by Madame du Mesnil du Buisson to have done her friend much good, both physically and morally. The group spent a fair amount of time singing (Antoine’s voice won unusual accolades) and attending masses with a visiting priest. Marie de Saint-Exupéry was unwavering in her religious beliefs, a devotion that may have been fortified by her ill health and by her frequent experiences with loss: in February 1907, just three years after the death of her husband, she lost her father as well. Her life and her household were held together, uncomplicatedly, by “a respect for the real riches of Christianity.” Her spirituality, if not entirely her faith, would deeply mark her son.

  Madame de Tricaud was, on the other hand, more lighthearted about her faith and less so about discipline. It was incumbent on the members of the household to join together in prayer at the Saint-Maurice chapel after dinner every evening, but in the practice of this ritual Saint-Exupéry found his aunt to be surprisingly casual: “As in truth this rite bored her a little, she began the prayer loudly as she left the drawing room, carrying along a whole procession behind her; then she kneeled and stood again, without any attention whatever t
o the others.” She reigned as something of a local authority over the village of Saint-Maurice, though less so, after the arrival of the Saint-Exupérys, over her own house. With all her heart she had adopted Madame de Saint-Exupéry and her affection extended, more fervently even, to her eldest daughter, Marie-Madeleine, who was frail; on her death in 1920 Madame de Tricaud left Saint-Maurice and its 250 hectares to the former and a large sum of money to the latter. She thought differently of her great-great-nephews. They were in her opinion “noisy, vulgar, messy, disobedient, demolishing everything they touched, or at the very least dirtying it.” Essentially she and they attempted to stay out of each other’s way. “My two brothers were,” Simone de Saint-Exupéry had to admit, “insufferable. But they were so like overly exuberant children no longer reined in by a father who had disappeared too early. They fought violently, accountable to no one.”