by Stacy Schiff
This description would not have sat well with Saint-Exupéry, who with no certain future was at the same time experiencing some difficulty liberating himself from the past. His accomplishments were as yet few and his dependence great, no matter how well he may have disguised these matters for his friends, which he probably did not, given his propensity toward truth. It left him, however, in a never-never land in terms of maturity. In the fall he had dinner with the Saint-Pouloffs, distant relatives whom he had not previously met but to whom his mother had introduced her son by letter. Afterward he wrote her indignantly: “But … what the devil did you write them? When Tante saw me she seemed extremely surprised and asked me if it hadn’t upset you too much to see me traveling alone. I looked stunned! Then she asked me, ‘But how old are you?’ ‘Twenty.’ ‘Twenty years old! From your mother’s letters I thought you were a little boy of fifteen!’ They imagined that I had never left your side and Tante had not been looking forward to having to deal with someone who knew nothing of life! When I told them that I had been a student in Paris for three years they stood aghast for fifteen minutes and had a good laugh. What the devil did you write them?”
He did not, however, make any heroic attempts to get on with things. He was in a holding pattern, and coupled with his financial dependence, this put a strain on the relationship with his mother. He must have been frustrated, and Madame de Saint-Exupéry must have felt frustrated not to have been able to bail him out. He was certainly not the first Frenchman to be handicapped by a lack of a diploma. Notable failures include André Malraux, who held no degree; Louis Renault, who met his demise with the Centrale exams; and Léon Blum, who left the École Normale Supérieure after having been done in by his first-year exams. It has even been suggested that the high failure rate at French examinations has resulted in a generally agitated and nervous population; France is a country where one can be reminded daily of one’s failure or success as a lycéen, where a reputation as a brilliant nineteen-year-old test-taker can pave one’s way for life. Saint-Exupéry began to complain of depression at the end of his Bossuet career, when he was probably exhausted as much as anything else. His visits to Saint-Maurice were often followed, however, by apologies for his brusqueness, or his irascibility, or his seeming ingratitude. He promised always to make amends, as he knew his mother had a good deal to contend with as things were, but he was forced all the same to ask for money. His helplessness with financial matters dates from this period, although in 1920 it seemed more a symptom of his directionlessness than a character trait. We do not know how much his mother lent him over the next years—in 1921 this allowance never amounted to less than a generous five hundred francs, or thirty-five dollars monthly—but we do know that Madame de Saint-Exupéry lent her son enough for the family to have credited him later with her financial ruin.
It was probably during this period that he began to visit the Louvre twice weekly to “feed my nascent artistic culture,” and to call on a favorite Bossuet professor, Abbé Sudour, who kindly—but severely—helped him to shape his prose. He continued to see as much theater as he could, often at the invitation of friends. Following Ségogne’s lead he got himself hired as an extra in a second-rate opera at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, in which he appeared as a Praetorian guard. This occupation did not outlast the ruckus Saint-Exupéry created when he dropped his lance on stage and had no choice but to bend over in a skimpy tunic to retrieve it. His violin and the volume of Baudelaire which his mother had given him were constant companions; the melancholy of both must have suited him. He seemed the perfect aesthete: “… everywhere I come across little things which enchant me as never before. A note of Chopin, a verse of Samain, a Flammarion binding, a diamond on the rue de la Paix,” he had reported the previous year.
His was not, however, the bohemian Saint-Germain life of a Joyce or a Hemingway. As lost as Saint-Exupéry was, some of the best drawing rooms of Paris were open to him. His existence became a chaotic one of lavish dinners and low rents, skimpy meals and sumptuous lodgings, a habit to which he ultimately became accustomed. We have no record of how he dressed during these times, but he was neither the world’s first nor last impoverished aristocrat, and was eccentric enough to have been allowed some latitude. At the Saussines he cut a familiar figure, declaiming verse while wrapped in a sheet. He may at this time have perfected the look that later became his style, as much out of insouciance as out of economy: a casualness verging on the shoddy.
Saint-Exupéry met with varied receptions at these fine addresses. With the Saussines the opinion divided between Monsieur de Saussine (“What a magnificent boy!”) and Madame de Saussine and one of her five daughters, confounded by his unpredictable muteness. He uttered not a single word in the course of a weekend with Yvonne de Lestrange’s parents, with whom the conversation ranged from politics to horses to finance to bridge; a report of his unacceptable behavior was conveyed to his mother. This “rampart of silence” posed less of an obstacle to the youngest of Saussine’s elder sisters, Renée, who felt any child could make short work of Saint-Exupéry’s inaccessibility and who either enjoyed this qualification or simply had a golden touch. The same could be said of the ravishing Louise de Vilmorin, whom Saint-Exupéry probably first met at this time. These were both of them households in which cleverness was not expected to conform to drawing room convention, and in which the eccentricities of this provincial count who had gone to all the right schools and was related to the Lestranges only added to the appeal. He must have seemed like a breath of fresh air.
For at least some of this period Saint-Exupéry lodged at the very affordable Hôtel La Louisiane, a few steps from the École des Beaux-Arts, and survived on a meager diet at the prix fixe restaurants of the neighborhood, where a good meal could be had for five francs, a decent bottle of wine for sixty centimes, and a bowl of stewed fruits could—with the right degree of charm, no obstacle to a persuasive and hungry young man—be parlayed into a side order of potatoes or Camembert. He did not want for friends. Charles Sallès was studying in Paris at HEC (Hautes Études Commerciales), France’s premier undergraduate business school, and Ségogne and Bertrand de Saussine were quick to invite their versifying friend home with them. These two were particularly responsible for his life of contrasts. Saussine introduced Saint-Exupéry to his parents and to his sisters in a sumptuous hôtel particulier on the rue Saint-Guillaume, a building whose walls had been impregnated with the verse, melodies, and prose of Lamartine, Ernest Renan, Proust, Reynaldo Hahn, and Ravel. Saint-Exupéry hardly needed the encouragement of this tradition and was known to borrow Renée’s violin for a little improvisation. Through a cousin, or possibly through Saussine, found his way as well to another of Paris’s best addresses, that of the Vilmorins on the rue de la Chaise, where ministers and politicians congregated. These were the “well-liked friends who like me back” of whom he had written home the previous year. With the Saussine children he discussed his lack of future options; Renée proved particularly sympathetic to his plight.
His dual existence was no more apparent than in his lodgings. His address was not always the Hôtel La Louisiane; for some portion of his Beaux-Arts career Saint-Exupéry lodged with Yvonne de Lestrange, in an apartment whose proximity to the school was hardly its most attractive feature. Lamotte remembered a visit to his impoverished friend, who had suggested he paint the stunning view from his windows and asked that Lamotte call early some morning, by which he meant toward eleven. Lamotte was met at the door of 9, quai Malaquais by a valet who looked disdainfully at his easel and left him on the sidewalk; he was rescued from this ignominy by his friend, enveloped in a luxurious bathrobe. Up a spiral staircase the two went to Saint-Exupéry’s quarters, where his breakfast had only just been touched. The room, a redux of the Bossuet desk, was an abominable mess: sheets of paper, bits of paper, balls of paper covered everything. (Yvonne de Lestrange later admitted that she dreaded the disorder her cousin created in the apartment. She was neither pleased nor surpris
ed when, during one of his later stays, she was awakened by “the sound of Niagara Falls” in the apartment. Saint-Exupéry had run a bath in his room above hers and promptly fallen asleep, turning the staircase into a torrent of hot water. With some difficulty she awoke him for a little assistance. As he opened an eye his first words were, “Why are you being so nasty with me this morning?”) The view, however, was indeed extraordinary. Two windows gave on to the Louvre, a third looked out over the school and the terrace of Chez Jarras. Lamotte sketched the scene many times during the winter of 1920 while Saint-Exupéry, seated on his bed in his bathrobe, wrote “à la Balzac”. As Balzac shut the noise of the Revolution of 1848 out and himself and his writing in with the words “And now, back to the real world,” Saint-Exupéry may have been able to defer thoughts of his future with these bohemian dabblings.
Doubtless he was dragging his feet intentionally. The previous year his military service had been deferred in light of his expected naval career, and he would have known he would eventually be called up. But the theme song of these six Parisian months seemed one he would articulate later, during an equally stagnant period for which the winter of 1920–21 was but a dress rehearsal: “What I shall be in ten years is the last of my worries.” He was all ability and little ambition.
~
He was called up to begin his two years of military service in April 1921. He had requested a posting in aviation, and on the ninth arrived in Strasbourg to join the Second Fighter Group, based in Neuhof, just south of the city. The Neuhof field was a large one, originally outfitted by the Germans; it became France’s with the recovery of Alsace in 1918 and served both as a military and as a commercial airstrip. Saint-Exupéry joined the Group as a private second-class; he was assigned to the ground crew. He was one of the low men on the totem pole: in French such personnel are known as rampants, as are creeping plants or crawling animals or those who grovel. Moreover, as a conscript with no previous training, he did not qualify for flight instruction. He was inducted as any young man without a bac, or a particule, or three years of training in higher mathematics would have been, and he spent the next few weeks putting these advantages to work.
He could not have made himself less conspicuous by renting a small apartment in town, to which he retired when his schedule allowed. (He was free between 11:00 and 1:30, again between 5:00 and 9:00, after which he returned to Neuhof and spent the night at the barracks.) His Strasbourg letters home were by and large composed on the rue du 22 Novembre, a saner place from which to write than the barracks, as the young soldier relaxed with a cup of tea and a cigarette. The address was the best in Strasbourg; the landlord’s telephone was at his disposal; he enjoyed the luxuries of central heating, electric lamps, and a bathtub. This clean, well-lighted room was not free, of course; for it Madame de Saint-Exupéry paid 120 francs a month. It was her son’s first furnished apartment and he was for a while enchanted by it, as by Strasbourg, “an exquisite city, much bigger than Lyons.”*
Despite a day that began punctually at six, the bohemian life came less to a screeching halt than he might have expected. Saint-Exupéry’s first impression of the métier militaire was that “there is categorically nothing to do.” He lobbied his mother for a motorcycle, with which he could make the commute from the airfield to the rue du 22 Novembre and with which he could, in his free time, tour Alsace. He claimed his life consisted of learning to salute, playing soccer, and keeping boredom at bay for hours, hands in his pockets and an unlighted cigarette in his mouth. More than anything the realm of military aviation—still entirely in its infancy, to be fair, to the extent that Saint-Exupéry arrived in Strasbourg before the uniforms did—seemed to him like a big soccer camp. It was hardly different from—and certainly no more boring than—the lycée. “Nothing to do between now and two o’clock. At two o’clock there will be nothing to do either, other than to move whoever was at place A to place B and whoever was at place B to place A, and then to do the opposite, which will allow us to start again from our original positions,” he wrote his mother soon after his arrival. In May this was charming; by early June the drill had begun to depress him. But by then his efforts to bend the rules had begun to pay off.
The man who would never pull rank lost no time in Strasbourg pulling strings. He had requested a posting in aviation so that he might fly, not train as a ground crewman and gunner, and his proximity to a field of Hanriots and SPAD-Herbemonts in no way thwarted that ambition. The rules did; new military pilots were trained at many bases throughout France but not at Strasbourg. Furthermore, only those men who arrived in Strasbourg classified as student pilots were allowed to fly. Civilian training was easier to come by—in the 1920s some 2,000 licenses were issued in France—but it was expensive. Full-blast, Saint-Exupéry turned the pertinacity to which he had subjected the residents of Saint-Maurice to his cause. In his assault on the regulations he was assisted, if not encouraged, by two of his officers. With Captain de Billy and Major de Féligonde he had something in common, and the two looked out for this unusual recruit as one of their own. Major de Féligonde promised to look into Saint-Exupéry’s request to become a student pilot, though he said it could take him at least two months to make the necessary arrangements. In the meantime he struck a deal with the well-educated private: as of May 26 Saint-Exupéry was to teach a course in aerodynamics and the physics of combustion. “I will have a classroom, a blackboard, and a handful of students.… What a blast! Can you see me as a professor?” he wrote his mother, profiting from the assignment to ask for money for his texts. (There is no evidence that Saint-Exupéry ever taught his course, although the funds and the texts did arrive.) He wondered if his mother knew Captain de Billy, who evidently had family in Lyons, and prevailed upon both his mother and his sister Gabrielle—now eighteen—to put in a good word for him with these supposed relatives.
Meanwhile Saint-Exupéry had paid a visit to the Compagnie Transaérienne de l’Est, one of the commercial firms that shared the Neuhof field with the military. Robert Aéby was the company’s only staff pilot; the group had hoped to win the Strasbourg-Brussels-Antwerp line, but had been beaten out by the Compagnie Franco-Roumaine, their next-door neighbor on the airfield. With five aircraft the Compagnie Transaérienne de l’Est (CTE) had reinvented itself as a concern specializing in chartered flights, joyrides, and aerial photos. On a clear Sunday morning in early April, probably the tenth, a shoddily dressed young man inquired after the price of a flight. It was fifty francs, a fairly large sum at the time (ten francs more than the Duchess de Vendôme’s box seats at the Comédie-Française), and Aéby doubted that his customer actually had the funds in hand. The young man agreed to the price, however, and Aéby took him up for his standard tour of the airfield, landing the Farman F-40 after about ten minutes. Aéby had taxied to the hangar and leapt out of the plane when his passenger asked if they might not try a second circuit. No one had made such a request before and Aéby was at first taken aback; soon enough he decided, however, that it was “rather a pleasant thing to do business with a fanatic.” Having made it clear that the second flight would cost an additional fifty francs, Aéby took off to inspect, at Saint-Exupéry’s request, the south and north of the city, the Vosges, and the Rhine, a flight that would have taken well over ten minutes.
On at least a few other occasions Saint-Exupéry took to the air, although his obligatory training as a gunner had not yet begun. It was not unusual for the military pilots, many of whom were young aces covered with decorations, to indulge the rampants who wanted to go up; generally these flights were without successors, as the pilots liked to treat their passengers to “memorable acrobatics sessions.” Saint-Exupéry only pleaded for more. His giddy report to his mother of his first experience of a SPAD-Herbemont, the premier fighter plane of the time, is also his first prose account of flight:
My senses of space, of distance, and of direction entirely vanished. When I looked for the ground I sometimes looked down, sometimes up, sometimes left, somet
imes right. I thought I was very high up when I would suddenly be thrown to earth in a near vertical spin. I thought I was very low to the ground and I was pulled up to 3,000 feet in two minutes by the 500-horsepower motor. It danced, it pitched, it tossed.… Ah! la la!
He looked forward to a second round the next day, when he anticipated with delight “the spins, the loops, the barrel rolls [which] will empty my stomach of a year’s worth of lunches.” How did he manage these flights in a SPAD? A corporal of the Group who was aware of the flights remained mystified by them. Saint-Exupéry told his mother only that he went up thanks to some acquaintances he had made. He hoped passionately to pilot a SPAD—“It holds the air like a shark holds the water, and even looks like a shark”—and lived for the moment when the regulations might allow him to do so. He was impetuous enough to consider volunteering for Morocco, where new French pilots were being trained in exchange for three years of service. (He was further tempted in this direction by the presence of his Rabat-stationed friend, Marc Sabran, with whom he kept up a healthy correspondence.) His letters brim with impatience. It was as if his awareness of lost time had caught up with him all at once.
