Saint-exupery: A Biography

by Stacy Schiff

  Together at the Sinéty home outside of Le Mans the Sinéty and the Saint-Exupéry children took dance lessons, instruction to which Antoine submitted only in the name of duty. He was particularly irked by the quadrille, which the group danced most often. “He put as much ill will into it as he possibly could, moving about more or less like a bear,” reported Odette de Sinéty, who had the ill fortune of being his regular partner. At Le Mans as well he was better remembered for his clumsiness than for his academic brilliance. He enjoyed notoriously bad luck with his fountain pens, the rage of the moment, instruments that in his hands proved true to their name. Nor was he more talented for cycling. He made a number of excursions with Jean-Marie Lelièvre, but generally fell behind on these expeditions and when anything went wrong with his bicycle enlisted a friend’s help to repair the machine. This did not prevent him, evidently, from having “hands as dirty, if not more so, as any one of us.” A favored destination was the Lelièvre country home five miles south of Le Mans, in the pines of the Mulsanne forest, next to the racetrack in a tiny village called Hunaudières. This half-mile-long hippodrome carved out of a piney wasteland was hallowed ground, although Antoine had missed the consecration by just over a year.

  ~

  On Saturday, August 8, 1908, two small boys had bicycled frantically into Le Mans, squeaking, “He flies! He flies!” For once their enthusiasm was not lost on the older generation; they had just witnessed the event that would usher in Europe’s air age. Aloft for one minute forty-five seconds, Wilbur Wright had made two perfectly controlled circuits over the Hunaudières racetrack. It was not the longest flight yet witnessed in France (this was a year when endurance records were claimed monthly for flights of fifteen or sixteen-and-one-half or twenty minutes), nor was it Wright’s longest flight to date. But what had been a routine demonstration for the American seemed nothing short of a miracle to the French, for whom flight had thus far been more a clumsy matter of lift than a scientific matter of control. Frenchmen had flown, but their aircraft had made lazy, shuddering takeoffs and uncertain landings; they would not have considered attempting a circuit in a field bordered on all sides by trees. No one at Hunaudières that day had ever seen a banked or tight turn, and hardly anyone expected as much from Wilbur Wright, who had been soundly written off by the French press as an “acrobat” and a “four-flusher.”

  Only a few hundred people were on hand for Wright’s demonstration, which had been delayed for days because of rain and which had finally taken place at 6:30 in the evening, but among them was the indestructible French aviator Louis Blériot. Blériot had himself stayed aloft for eight and one-half minutes a month earlier; still, he knew the import of what he had just witnessed. “A new era in mechanical flight has commenced,” he announced. “I am not sufficiently calm after the event to thoroughly express my opinion.” Others did, however, and by Monday a crowd of 2,000 lined the racetrack. That day Wright flew twice, first executing a tight, 100-degree turn, later executing the first figure eight performed in Europe. “We are beaten,” conceded Le Matin on Tuesday, when a crowd of 3,000 awaited the vindicated American, who flew three times around the track at an altitude of about seventy feet. “You never saw anything like the complete reversal of position that took place after two or three little flights of less than two minutes each,” Wilbur wrote his brother on Friday, when it seemed abundantly clear that the Americans were not bluffing, and when their mastery of lateral control was not yet fully understood by the industry it was about to transform.

  If France appeared to have taken the lead in aviation before Wright’s demonstration at Le Mans, it was in large part due to a speech the French-born engineer Octave Chanute had made at the Aéro-Club de France five years earlier in which he reported on the Wrights’ work, to which he had been a contributor at Kitty Hawk. Immediately French design had taken off. With Wright’s demonstrations at Le Mans the gift of wing-warping—part of the Americans’ solution to the control problem—was bestowed on the French, who lost no time in incorporating the advance into their machines.* Aviation took root quickly and conspicuously in France, where it was hardly favored by the weather, for many reasons. The countrymen of the ballooning Montgolfier brothers felt strongly that it was their birth-right to succeed in the field. The Aéro-Club de France, founded in 1898, was the first organization of its kind; a glimpse at its membership and its mores yields a number of clues as to the country’s preeminence. A great quantity of Champagne was consumed at the club’s meetings, which were held at Maxim’s, a restaurant where the prices were intentionally kept high to guarantee an exclusive clientele. Most early members could boast a fortune, or a ranking position in the automobile industry, or, if nothing else, a particule. Flying began as a fantasy of the wealthy industrialist, or the well-placed engineer, or the society figure with a military background. It was to become the domain of the gentleman-pilot; later, aviation relied for its advancement on government subsidy. All of these commodities France had in great supply. It would have been difficult to locate such a confluence of wealth and gallantry and engineering acumen elsewhere in the world in the early part of the century; France was a country in which a perfectly respectable man might spend the afternoon in the Jardin d’Acclimatation performing dirigible experiments instead of disappearing into the caverns of Wall Street or into the City of London. More a sport than a technology, aviation borrowed from the leisured classes of other countries: it was the transplanted Brazilian Alberto Santos-Dumont who in 1906, in Paris, made the first powered flight in Europe. In this respect the fledgling aviation business resembled the fashion industry: haute couture made its home in Paris, where a good number of its customers lived, even if its prime movers, like its founder, regularly hailed from elsewhere.

  As it was to the fashion and automotive industries, in which France led the world, that country’s dedication to high-quality, small-scale production was a blessing to the young aviation industry. So was the predominance in France of the family firm, where one man’s vision could nimbly engage a specialized work force. Europeans, too, had reason to be acutely aware of their borders; the immediate applications of air travel were especially obvious to a modest-sized country hemmed in by former enemies. During the early years of the century the Germans lost ground in aviation because they were too much seduced by Count von Zeppelin’s success with the rigid airship; the British had more reason than the French to feel secure. American apathy at the time may have had something to do with the greater distances to be covered, distances that the airplane initially appeared unqualified to traverse. France, too, benefited from a well-developed taste for public competition. Having just contributed the Eiffel Tower, the Suez Canal, and the Paris Métro to the wonders of the world, she was ripe for a new challenge.* In 1905, when it came time for the Wright brothers to sell their invention, they went first to their own government. After they were thrice rebuffed by a skeptical United States War Department and by the British authorities, they headed to France with the Flyer.

  In March 1908, after months of negotiations, the Wrights signed a contract licensing the Flyer to a French syndicate. Their agreement called for two fifty-kilometer demonstration flights; it was in order to fulfill this obligation that Wilbur Wright set up shop in Le Mans. During the month of June he had considered a number of fields, ultimately settling on the race course at Hunaudières, his second choice, because it was far from the French limelight and because the president of the local flying club, Léon Bollée, had kindly offered the use of his auto factory and some assistance from his workers. Despite Bollée’s generous hospitality and the attentions of a local canned foods manufacturer who saw to it that the American’s shed was well-stocked with the finest sardines, anchovies, and asparagus available, Le Mans proved less than idyllic for Wilbur Wright, however. The customs officials had damaged his crated-up Flyer, which took seven weeks to reassemble; Bollée’s workers spoke as little English as Wright spoke French; Wright had no assistant. To Octave Chanute he wrote that Le Ma
ns was an old-fashioned town “almost as much out of this world in some respects as Kitty Hawk.”

  Le Mans had no reason to complain of Wright. Between August 8, 1908, and January 2, 1909, he flew regularly in its immediate vicinity—nine times at Hunaudières and 120 at the artillery field of Auvours, his first-choice field, which the French army made available to him after the convincing miracles at Hunaudières. Daily two or three thousand people turned out to see him work his magic, half the time with a passenger beside him in the Flyer. He wrote Orville that nothing he had done had created as much astonishment as his having taken the 240-pound Bollée for a trip around the field. He spoke too soon: on December 31 he ended the year—one that had begun with a dramatic French circuit of 1½ minutes—with a flight of nearly 2½ hours, performed in subzero weather, for which he was awarded the Michelin Cup and, more or less simultaneously, the Légion d’Honneur.

  If 1908 was the annus mirabilis of aviation, 1909 was the year aviation came of age, and it unquestionably did so on European soil. Wilbur Wright had only just sailed home when the French—most visibly in the form of Blériot—began to claim the lead in aviation. At 4:00 a.m. on Sunday, July 25, Blériot hobbled out of bed in Calais, on the northern coast of France, to his airplane. The monoplane was newly outfitted with warped wings, with which Blériot had been experimenting on and off—he had been the first to adapt ailerons, the form of lateral control preferred today—since before Wright’s arrival in France. He walked on crutches, his foot having been badly burned in an earlier accident. Thirty-seven minutes after he had taken off from Calais he landed in a British meadow behind Dover Castle. His crutches strapped to the side of his airplane, he had crossed the English Channel with no navigational aid other than his own two eyes. The reaction to a Frenchman’s having penetrated England’s legendary isolation was not what it had been in 1066; Blériot was greeted like a demigod by the British. In London his airplane was displayed at Selfridge’s department store, where 120,000 people came to admire it. In Paris later in the week the machine was drawn through the delirious city like an imperial chariot, armored Bepublican Guards flashing their sabers in salute as Blériot passed. (In photographs taken in both cities the triumphant hero appears steady on his feet and the crutches are nowhere in evidence.) A month later the Champagne manufacturers of Reims sponsored the world’s first air meet, an event that proved a watershed event in the history of aviation. Thirty-eight airplanes entered the August competition; although the event was international all the pilots save an American and an Englishman were French. Well over 100,000 spectators flocked to Reims to see record after record fall. Of more enduring importance was the fact that six of the machines at Reims were on sale to the public. Along with two models offered later in the year these represented the first complete generation of aircratt, from which every plane flying today is descended.

  It was in the wake of the excitement over Reims that Saint-Exupéry moved to Le Mans. He was a year too late to witness the magic of Hunaudières, but Wright’s spell hung palpably enough in the air.* French aviation fever had set in; the persistent schoolboy was far from the only one designing aircraft in these years. By the end of 1911 Frenchmen held more flying licenses than the United States, England, and Germany combined; the world altitude, endurance, and speed records belonged to France. That year the first long-distance competitions began, and French pilots dominated them all. The same year it took an American seven weeks and fifteen major crashes to coax a Wright biplane—almost entirely rebuilt in the course of the ordeal—across the United States to claim a $50,000 Hearst prize. With the exception of Glenn Curtiss’s seaplanes, European machines were now measurably superior to American ones in design and performance, and French aircraft were the most sophisticated of all.† These were giddy, feverish days so far as aviation went, years when the naysayers were proved foolish within minutes of their pronouncements. There was no reason to think Saint-Exupéry any more sensitive to these developments than any other preadolescent boy, but he could not have escaped them. The years 1909 to 1914 saw a series of nonstop firsts, some more happy than others—the first long-distance flight, the first airmail delivery, the first intentional acrobatics, the first woman to be killed in an airplane, the first midair collision, the first cat to cross the English Channel—and the press had a field day. Saint-Exupéry’s childhood was steeped every bit as much in these events as it was in Hans Christian Andersen or Jules Verne. The airplane had not existed in the year of his birth; by the time he was fourteen a $50,000 prize had been offered for the first nonstop transatlantic flight and $150,000 had been offered for the fastest trip made around the world in fewer than ninety days. Events would delay both of these competitions; Lindbergh would not land at Le Bourget for another thirteen years, by which time the world already felt smaller and the prize in question was worth half as much. Both for aviation and for its future bard, these were the glorious—and the innocent—years.

  ~

  Saint-Exupéry flew for the first time in late July 1912, while on vacation at Saint-Maurice. He and his sister Gabrielle bicycled regularly that summer to the recently opened airfield at Ambérieu, four miles from the château, where a number of Lyons industrialists experimented with the manufacture of aircraft. One in particular had met with success and lent his name—along with that of the two Polish brothers who had perfected the craft for him—to an early, all-metal plane. The Berthaud-Wroblewski resembled a bat as much as it did a modern airplane, but it held the air well despite its stem-operated controls, its considerable weight, and a seventy-horsepower motor. Three Berthaud-W planes were built, the second with a powerful engine in the hope of attracting an army contract. It says something about the science of early aviation that in March 1914, several days before the military contract was to be signed, the souped-up Berthaud-Wroblewski crashed at Ambérieu, killing both of the Wroblewski brothers.

  It was in the third of these three planes, piloted by Gabriel Wroblewski, that Saint-Exupéry received his “baptěme de l’air. “He had become a familiar face at the hangars, where he brought his prodigious curiosity to bear on the work of the mechanics, whom he terrorized with a stream of questions. He was particularly eager to fly, something his mother—who had herself visited the field several times, possibly only to ensure that her son’s wishes went unheeded—had strictly prohibited. One afternoon late in July Antoine arrived at the field triumphant, however. Alfred Thénoz, then a twenty-year-old mechanic, vividly remembered the twelve-year-old’s exchange with Gabriel Wroblewski:

  —Sir, Maman has now authorized me to receive my baptism.

  —Is that true?

  —Yes, sir, I promise you!

  There is ample reason to think that this conversation has been reported verbatim, none that Madame de Saint-Exupéry had suddenly experienced a change of heart. The gambit worked, however, and on a perfectly clear, windless summer afternoon Antoine de Saint-Exupéry sailed twice around the field of Ambérieu in a Berthaud-Wroblewski. While history was hardly made—more than ten years would elapse before the passenger would earn his pilot’s license—an obsession was. The young enthusiast was almost certainly unable to keep the exploit secret from his mother: Georges Thibaut, the village boy who had introduced Saint-Exupéry to the Ambérieu flyers, reported afterward that “he jumped for joy.” Antoine also invited Thibaut back to the château to discuss aviation over a snack in the kitchen. Back in Le Mans he courted Odette de Sinéty with tales of aeronautical adventure; he put an airplane on the cover of his ill-fated magazine at Sainte-Croix; he penned a poem, beginning with the lines “The wings quivered in the evening breeze/The engine’s song lulled the sleeping soul,” for the Abbé Margotta, a work which does not suggest that this man and this machine would be linked forever on the page. When it came time to offer condolences to Madame Wroblewski on the death of her two sons, Madame de Saint-Exupéry wrote that Pierre and Gabriel had been extraordinarily indulgent toward “mon petit Antoine. “Saint-Exupéry, too, sent a note from
Le Mans, clearly dictated by his mother.

  For Saint-Exupéry those few minutes at Ambérieu may have been the central event of these years. The rest of the world turned on what happened two summers later, in Sarajevo. On August 2, 1914, all Frenchmen over the age of twenty-one were mobilized; more than a million men—15 percent of the adult male population—made their way to the front lines. By the end of the summer, one month after the formal declaration of World War I, Antoine’s godfather, Guy de Saint-Exupéry’s father, was dead at the age of forty-nine. Madame de Saint-Exupéry was appointed head nurse at the hospital set up at the Ambérieu train station. So as to be nearer her, Antoine—and presumably François as well, although the record is unclear—were recalled from Le Mans and enrolled at a Jesuit school in Villefranche-sur-Saône, forty-five miles from Saint-Maurice. We do not know how the schoolboys felt about the outbreak of hostilities, but we do know that Notre-Dame-de-Mongré and the Saint-Exupéry boys did not take well to each other. Things began poorly for the timid, chubby-cheeked Antoine, whose turned-up nose and dreamy demeanor immediately earned him the nickname “Pique-la-Lune,” or “space cadet.” The impression was again borne out by the testimony of his classmates. Louis Barjon, who went on to become a priest, found Saint-Exupéry most memorable for his otherworldliness: “He was above all a dreamer. I remember him, his chin resting on his hand, staring out the window at the cherry tree.… I recall an unassuming boy, an original, who was not bookish, and yet who was prone from time to time to certain explosions of joy, of exuberance.” The portrait was to remain entirely accurate.

  Academically Saint-Exupéry continued his affair with mediocrity. After consulting the school’s records, the head of Mongré wrote in 1951: “Our man was an average student except in French, where his grades were still lower than they should have been, due to his appalling spelling.” Antoine’s fortes continued to be poetry and drawing. Both of these interests he pursued, with fervor, on his own; he penned a number of epic poems on the war and about Kaiser Wilhelm, which he illustrated with witty caricatures. Later he would disassociate himself from these early literary efforts, which he could not have thought anyone would have bothered to save. “Of course I was convinced I was a poet, and for two years composed verses madly, like all youngsters,” he admitted regarding his juvenilia, which not unjustly has been called “bad Racine, massacred Hugo.” He was as ever less methodical with his assignments, and with his neighbor in study hall heartily amused himself disturbing the peace and keeping his classmates from their work. He taught himself to write perfectly legible sentences in reverse: “At school I wrote interminable epic poems and learned to write them this way so the masters and fellow pupils could not read over my shoulder,” he explained to a dazzled reporter in 1941. The Mongré administration could not have been entirely disappointed when, at the end of this first trimester, Madame de Saint-Exupéry, evidently acceding to her two sons’ wishes, removed them from the school. The boys completed the 1914–15 academic year back in Le Mans, and the following fall were sent off for two happier years to a school run by the Marianist order in Switzerland. For the first time they were boarders, and for the first time they were far from their mother for months at a stretch.