by Stacy Schiff
It was the consensus of the extended family that the Saint-Exupéry children were outrageously spoiled. Certainly they were altogether unversed in discipline, which meant they did not take well to those more willing to dispense it than their mother. Saint-Exupéry’s lifelong memory of the dark, central hallway of Saint-Maurice was colored by his memory of his mother’s brother, Uncle Hubert, “the very image of severity,” pacing that corridor with another uncle while a five- or six-year-old Tonio cowered in the shadows. “This man who never in his life had tweaked a child’s ear or pinched its cheek affectionately always threatened me when I had been naughty with a terrifying frown and these words: ‘The next time I go to America I shall bring back a whipping machine. American machines are the most modern in the world. That is why American children are the best behaved in the world.’ ” A cousin remembered the eleven-year-old Antoine as always having had a bone to pick with someone. The person with whom he locked horns most often was his grandfather, Fernand de Saint-Exupéry, with whom he spent several vacations. “My grandfather and Antoine had this in common,” recalled the cousin. “Both, being from the South, very much liked to talk, but my grandfather was deeply persuaded that only grown-ups were entitled to participate in conversation, while children were to listen sensibly without saying a word. Antoine was in no way convinced that silence suited youth. This difference of opinion was the cause of a great deal of recrimination and reproach.” The ambiance of her husband’s family, explained Marie de Saint-Exupéry smilingly to one of her son’s intimates, “was like the reign of Marcus Aurelius.” One uncle loudly prophesied that the Saint-Exupéry boys would amount to nothing. The forty-two-year-old Saint-Exupéry entrusted his response to the narrator of The Little Prince: “I have lived a great deal among grown-ups. I have seen them up close. That has not much improved my opinion.”
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When he came to face the adult world Saint-Exupéry often deferred to his youth. His are the best accounts we have of his childhood, and while his brief exercises in autobiography invite a host of questions about what memory may have consciously and unconsciously pushed aside, they also help to determine what mattered most to the man. His mother vouched for the accuracy of his many reports, even if she might have termed folly what he deemed adventure; she knew as well as anyone that for all his tale-spinning her son was no affabulateur. Simone de Saint-Exupéry’s descriptions of the years at Saint-Maurice also bear out the images invoked by her younger brother:
The life of Antoine, as a child, was one of total osmosis with his family and also with that more humble universe of plants and animals which was for us Saint-Maurice and its park. When the weather was good we built tree houses and cabins carpeted with moss in the lilac bushes.… When it rained we played charades, or we explored the attic. Oblivious to the clouds of dust and to the falling plaster, we probed the cracks in the walls and in the old beams, in search of the treasure, because, we thought, every old house contains its treasure.
This traffic in elusive riches was something Saint-Exupéry carried everywhere with him. Often it was the only baggage he had. It did not matter that the treasure went undiscovered, he reminds us in The Little Prince; it need only to exist to cast a spell over a house. He had no interest in a “house without secrets, without recesses, without mysteries … subterranean chambers, buried chests, treasures”; about his friends he felt similarly. The “quest for hidden gold” that will be transposed to the skies in Night Flight is still earthbound—and most literal—in Southern Mail:
When we were ten we found refuge in the attic’s timber-work. Dead birds, old bursting trunks, extraordinary garments—the stage-wings of life. And this treasure we said was hidden, this secret treasure of old houses, so wondrously described in fairy-tales—sapphires, opals, diamonds. This treasure which shone softly. The raison d’ětre of each wall, each beam. Huge beams defending the house against we knew not what. But yes—against time. For time was the arch-enemy.
Restless as he may have been, Saint-Exupéry did not race to grow up, or make a lunge for his freedom. That—in the garden of Saint-Maurice, under the indulgent eye of his mother—he had in ample supply. Rather he returned to the park later, when his archenemy proved its ineluctability, when the world proved harsh. Over and over he wrote his mother that she was his refuge, his security, his “reservoir of peace,” his “font of tenderness,” his “all-powerful support.” “It is you I think of when I am sick, when I am sad, when I am alone,” he assured her in 1931, not long after his marriage. The previous year he had mailed her a particularly poignant letter: “What taught me the meaning of infinity was not the Milky Way, or aviation, or the sea, but the second bed in your room. It was a wonderful thing to be sick; each of us wanted to be so in his turn. That bed was an endless ocean to which the flu admitted us.” At a more troubled time he would describe the very act of getting out of a warm bed to report to flying duty as “being torn from the maternal arms.” He wore this fierce maternal love as a sort of cloak wherever he went, pulling it more closely around himself as he aged. “Once you are a man you are left to yourself. But who can avail against a little boy whose hand is firmly clasped in the hand of an all-powerful Paula?” he asked as he flew through German fire, phrasing his epitaph, in May 1940. In a similar way he conjured up images of Moisie and her stockpile of linens when stranded in the Sahara.
The “sovereign protection” provided Saint-Exupéry by the women of Saint-Maurice extended to the memories of the house itself: it was as if he advanced into the world cosseted by this retreat into the past. He claimed to learn the concept of eternity from Moisie, elsewhere to have inferred it from the pacing of his two uncles up and down the Saint-Maurice hallway, “like the tides,” lamenting the future of France. He treasured the mysteries that filtered to his third-floor room from the bridge table at night. The image of clean, white, well-pressed sheets would comfort him in distress in Libya, in Guatemala, alone in the Sahara; it appears in his first story and in his last book, published posthumously more than twenty years later. The most rewarding, most reliable, most benevolent acquaintance he had ever made, the twenty-nine-year-old wrote his mother, was with “the little stove of the room upstairs at Saint-Maurice. Never has anything so much reassured me about existence.… I don’t know why but it made me think of a faithful dog. That little stove protected us from everything; I’ve never had such a good friend.” He would go so far as to recommend its unerring loyalty to his wife in a wartime letter: “You must be like the little stove of my childhood at Saint-Maurice, which puffed away peacefully in my room when the winter night frosted the windows. I would wake up and listen to the fat belly of the little stove purr away. I had the impression I was protected by this little household god—and I would go back to sleep, happy to be alive.”
This magical childhood gurgles beneath the surface of every one of Saint-Exupéry’s works. It turned him into a fine storyteller, but the lost world could also be distracting. To a man with a dizzyingly abstract mind it could seem more compelling than the tasks at hand. “This world of childhood memories,” he cautioned his mother when he was thirty, “will always seem to me hopelessly more real than the other.” Later in the same letter—written from Buenos Aires as he was battling homesickness and beginning Night Flight, the first draft of which opened at Saint-Maurice with an image of Madame de Saint-Exupéry—he added, “I am not sure I have lived since my childhood.” It is as if the sandstorms and dissident tribes and mechanical failures of the desert had been a dream, Moisie’s laundry closet a persistent reality. What Baudelaire described as genius—childhood recovered at will—could prove as much a curse as a blessing: for Saint-Exupéry it proved a constant occasion for regret. In his late thirties, on an occasion when his presence evoked a tribute of childish squeals, he remarked solemnly, “There is one thing that will always sadden me, which is to have grown up.” Adulthood was for him an exile, by far a more painful one than the long, desolate months at Cape Juby. The narrator of The Little P
rince is very lonely in the adult world—lonely, that is, until he meets the Little Prince, an emissary from another land, where children may conjure with weighty problems but remain, at no cost to themselves, children. The adult Saint-Exupéry would find that not everyone was as indulgent of his peccadillos and demands and independence of mind as had been the inhabitants of Saint-Maurice. A happy childhood, too, takes its hostages.
III
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Things in Heaven and Earth
1909–1915
My desire for knowledge is intermittent, but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant
THOREAU, Excursions
At the end of the summer of 1909, Madame de Saint-Exupéry moved her family north to Le Mans, an industrial city of 70,000 people 140 miles southwest of Paris. Here her father-in-law had settled after his political career had come to an end, and here he—and two of his daughters—remained. A vestige of Le Mans or western France, not Lyons, remained always in Saint-Exupéry’s speech, a considerate tribute to paternal tradition. The move appears to have been made with the boys’ schooling in mind; Fernand de Saint-Exupéry had sent his two sons to the Collège Notre-Dame-de-Sainte-Croix, and it was with the Jesuits that his grandsons enrolled in October. Their cousin, Guy de Saint-Exupéry, was one year ahead of Antoine. Saint-Exupéry was placed in a class of 7ème, or the equivalent of sixth grade, evidently having studied for a year or two at Mont-Saint-Barthélemy, a religious school in Lyons. He was a new student in a school of 250, which began with the first grade and at which half the students were boarders. Either to welcome him into the fold or to keep him in his place, his name was immediately corrupted by classmates to “Tatane.”
The Saint-Exupéry homestead, a modest apartment with a small garden at number 21, rue du Clos-Margot, does not appear to have been one that placed a particular emphasis on order. This may have been due to Madame de Saint-Exupéry’s occasional absences, when the boys were left to their aunts’ care. It appears, for example, that the apartment’s only clock did not work. Paul Gaultier, a neighbor on the northern side of the city and a fellow Sainte-Croix student, made the twenty-five-minute walk to school every morning with Antoine. The two were meant to start out at 7:30 so as to arrive in time for their 8:00 o’clock class. Bright and early each day Saint-Exupéry landed on the Gaultier doorstep and asked the time; invariably it was between 6:00 and 6:30. At least once he mentioned that the Saint-Exupérys did not have a clock on the rue Clos-Margot. It seems less likely that this explanation was believed than that he enjoyed a second breakfast before setting off to class.
Saint-Exupéry did not distinguish himself academically during his first years in Le Mans. Simone de Saint-Exupéry stated the case most succinctly when she declared that her younger brother was “in no way a child prodigy.” The Sainte-Croix fathers, who taught a curriculum rich in Latin and Greek, remembered him as a child who was “incapable of sitting still, big-hearted, intelligent, but too often distracted.” They had no shortage of reasons to detain him after class, given a succession of failed math tests, his fickle attention span, and the disorder of his desk and person, and they did. His grades fluctuated wildly, although overall he obtained better results than his disappointing marks for “general conduct” and “order, appearance, cleanliness” might have led one to expect.
Descriptions of Saint-Exupéry in Le Mans, between the ages of nine and fifteen, tally less with the rambunctious inventor of Saint-Maurice than with the introverted philosopher: his sister suggested that, removed from the warmth of his family, he became a secretive child. Jean-Marie Lelièvre, who had been a student at Sainte-Croix since 1905, remembered this new addition to the class as cheerless and slow to smile. His professors thought him “dreamy and meditative,” qualities little understood by his classmates, who kidded him for being “off in space.” He did not appreciate their gibes, although his anger was generally short-lived.
His literary efforts may not always have conformed to the program of study, but they in no way abated at Sainte-Croix. Here his correspondence with his mother, who was at times during the school year at Saint-Maurice or the château de La Mole, began. One of the first and longest of these letters was Saint-Exupéry’s account of a field trip to the Benedictine monastery at Solesmes, a visit that would very nearly haunt him later in life. In 3ème, at the age of thirteen, he approached Jean-Marie Lelièvre to ask if Lelièvre would like to collaborate on a magazine he was publishing. Saint-Exupéry had reserved the first page and the poetry column for himself but had already recruited a sportswriter, a caricaturist, and several other columnists. The publication did not survive its first issue, which won its editors private audiences with the père préfet and numerous hours of detention. The following year, however, he made off with the coveted prize for the year’s best French composition. In 3ème Saint-Exupéry began for the first time to take an interest in the curriculum, under the tutelage of the Abbé Margotta, whom Lelièvre remembered as an uncommonly inspiring professor, a man who could have boasted—but did not—of having been the first for whom Saint-Exupéry wrote about aviation. By the time Antoine fell under the care of the 2ème French professor, the dour Abbé Launay, he was recognized as a highly accomplished stylist, by his rhetoric professor’s reckoning the best in the class. He cemented his reputation in the Abbé Launay’s classroom with a 1914 composition titled “Odyssey of a Hat,” one with which the priest was so impressed that “he made us read and discuss the piece for more than two hours,” recalled Lelièvre, mollified in retrospect by its author’s having made good on the essay’s promise.
Saint-Exupéry’s first claim to literary fame took the form of an autobiography of a top hat. The hat relates its birth in a factory, prior to its arrival in the window of the greatest hatter of Paris, where its elegance is the envy of all passersby and where the hat “lived in peace and quiet, awaiting the day when I would make my appearance in the world.” One night it is sold to a gentleman so distinguished that the merchant doubles his asking price, “because his motto was never to miss an opportunity—or a bank note.” The top hat’s virtues are widely admired when it makes its debut at the gentleman’s club; for several months it leads a pampered life, enjoying the special attentions of a valet who grooms it twice daily. Life changes dramatically, however, when the hat becomes a wedding present to the gentleman’s coachman: “The first day I rolled three times in the mud and—oh, cruel fate—was not even wiped off.” To avenge this neglect the hat shrinks; its cleverness backfires, however, and it is sold, for six francs, to a used-clothing merchant, “a dreadful Jew,” as the fourteen-year-old Saint-Exupéry had it. On the next transaction his price drops to less than three francs, which wins him little respect from his new owner; happily, he is in his care only a short time when a furious gust of wind blows him to the birds on the Seine. After voyaging along with the fish he falls into the “avid hands” of a ragman, who entrusts him to the dim and dirty cottage that serves as the “store of the grand clothier of Their Majesties the Kings of Africa.” Soon enough he overcomes his fright of his new master, the most powerful prince of his country, whose hands, he is reassured to observe, do not discolor what they touch. The top hat writes these lines during the last days of his life, in the hope that they will make their way to France, so that his compatriots “will know that I am in a country where the fashion of going hatless will never take root; and that when I have outlived my usefulness I may well be worshiped as a relic, for having once graced the head of my illustrious master, Bam-Boum II, King of Niger.”
“Odyssey of a Hat” was returned to Saint-Exupéry with a grade roughly equivalent to an A–. Launay all the same returned it with the comment: “Far too many spelling errors, style occasionally clumsy.” It is easy to forgive Saint-Exupéry the cultural stereotypes of his time in light of the political views he would have absorbed at home and in light of his schooling; it was entirely the privileged who sent their children to the Jesuits. At the age
of fourteen he had probably met few people who were pro-Dreyfus and not yet anyone who was firmly pro-Republic. Literarily if not politically the document is almost too neatly anticipatory: Saint-Exupéry would stake his reputation on serving a master well; he would remain obsessed with the passage of time. The premium on fancy, and the whimsical indictment of adult mores, would prove the marks both of his life and his literature. He, too, would be swept off to Africa, blown in part by the winds, as, later, the Little Prince would “for his escape … take advantage of the migration of a flock of wild birds.” In these travels Saint-Exupéry would shake off the cultural biases of his time. It is fair to say, however, that the political leanings of the average Sainte-Croix student—and a fourteen-year-old Frenchman is by no means too young to hold a political opinion—were decidedly Royalist, especially at a time when the separation of Church and State was being accomplished. This divorce took a painful toll on an institution like Sainte-Croix, forced by government decree and a failed countersuit to move to more modest quarters; there is no reason to think that the preadolescent Saint-Exupéry dissented from the school’s prevailing monarchical leanings.
To his early literary habits he remained in Le Mans entirely true. Odette de Sinéty, the daughter of family friends who was two years his elder and whose brothers also attended Notre-Dame-de-Sainte-Croix, vividly remembered his visits to their château. His manner of expressing his admiration for her famous blond beauty took a familiar form: Antoine “wrote poems, tragedies, and repeatedly insisted on reading them to us. To tell the truth, at that age we preferred playing to listening. This did not deter him from frequently following me, declaiming as he went, his works in hand.” Thanks to Odette de Sinéty a number of these early poems survive: the Abbé Launay would not have been impressed by the quantity of spelling errors, rivaled only by the depth of the young poet’s romanticism, which visibly bore the traces of the nineteenth-century master Lamartine.
