Saint-exupery: A Biography

by Stacy Schiff

  Things began to go seriously awry the following month. Louise returned to Paris, as scheduled, but with second thoughts about the marriage. These were presented to Saint-Exupéry—who did not at first see them for what they were—as medical concerns. Her doctors were worried about the effect childbearing might have on her hip, and the marriage, which had been set for November 1, was postponed for six to eight months. Perhaps Louise’s family’s objections had begun to wear her down; perhaps Saint-Exupéry’s indigence did. She was neither the first nor the last woman to remark that he was impossible to please: “Nothing satisfies Antoine; nothing is perfect; his demands are not limited by reason. He searches out gray areas and misunderstandings.” At the beginning of October Saint-Exupéry made the trip to Saint-Maurice for Gabrielle’s wedding to Pierre Giraud d’Agay, a Fonscolombe neighbor in the Midi with whom the Saint-Exupérys had been friendly since childhood. Louise was meant to have accompanied him but did not do so, and the young fiancé—who was watching his own nuptials crumble before him—put in a very solemn performance as brother-of-the-bride. His sullenness was much remarked upon and is borne out by photographs of the festivities of the tenth, in which he broods darkly. He was aware of having behaved badly and sent his mother an eloquent explanation—the letter stops just short of constituting an apology—on his return to Paris. She really could not hold his bitterness against him, he wrote; he had had such a difficult time of late. He had now taken the upper hand, however, and promised to be the sweetest son imaginable if she were to visit him in Paris. (He was in a rented apartment on the rue Vivienne.)

  Louise went to Biarritz for the winter—the reason given was that some dispute with her paternal grandmother precluded a winter spent closer to Paris at Verrières—leaving Saint-Exupéry to report that his greatest joy was in his work. From Biarritz he must have had disturbing news about the marriage because he made the trip to the resort town toward Christmastime to “clear things up.” Louise was kind with him and asked for a month or two to sort out her thoughts, which were not sorted out in Saint-Exupéry’s favor. In his next letter to his mother he begged that she not speak to him at all about the affair, about which he claimed he never again wanted to think, although he did for at least the next ten years. He relied a good deal on Louise’s sister, Marie-Pierre—who presumably understood his fiancée better than any of his other confidants—to help him through this period, but was so heartbroken that he went so far as to make a pilgrimage to the Villemin hospital, where he had so much looked forward to his future happiness. He saw Louise again for the first time several years later, when he stumbled upon her getting out of a taxi. She did not see him, but Saint-Exupéry swore that if she had he would have turned away. She was pregnant, but it was he who nearly fainted.

  ~

  Saint-Exupéry had fallen for one of the great seductresses of his time, a woman who energetically lived a line for which she was famous: “Je t’aimerai, d’amour, toujours ce soir.” (“I shall love you, forever, tonight.”) He was her second fiancé; probably he should have given more thought to the naval lieutenant who preceded him. The same frivolity that endeared Louise to Saint-Exupéry made her perfectly unreliable, as no one knew better than she. “I have no faith in my fidelity,” she announced years later. It would be some time before he could bear to see her again, and he was surprised by the persistence of his attachment. In 1925 he felt still that she was the only woman he had met whom he could have married. From Cape Juby two years after that he wrote her frequently, still analyzing her heart and their relationship. “Oh, Loulou, you do weigh heavily!” he remarked at the time. In early 1929 he asked if they might not correspond; he was ready to forgive her even if she were to hurt him from time to time. He promised not to speak to her of love—as he repeatedly had in a series of letters in the intervening five years—although this was not to say he had forgotten what had come before. That, he had to admit, was impossible: “What I need is a happy love affair, but I don’t give a damn about any romance save one. That is my illness …” he confessed. It was courtship of a kind. He had not stopped sending Louise his literary efforts, and with this letter enclosed a draft of Southern Mail, which he hoped she might allow him to dedicate to her. Along with a finished copy of the book he sent a long, explicit love letter. In Louise he confided what he called the secret of his novel about the airmails: The work amounted to a conversation with the fairy of an enchanted kingdom, the kind of fairy she had been for him, who reigned over the kind of kingdom he so wanted to inhabit. “Do not forget me too much,” he closed.

  At the time he wrote this letter his ex-fiancée was married and a mother. Almost inadvertently Louise de Vilmorin had wound up the wife of an American sixteen years her elder. Henry Leigh Hunt, the son of Leigh S. J. Hunt, a roving entrepreneur who had made a fortune in mining in Korea and had gone on to invest heavily in the development of Las Vegas, had fought for France in the war and became a Vilmorin family friend. He serenaded Louise with tales of the South American tropics, of parakeets and monkeys and orchids and birds of paradise. “I should so much like to see all that,” sighed Louise, to which Hunt responded that she need only marry him to do so. If it seemed she should pay the price for having broken the heart of a peripatetic aviator she did, albeit briefly: she was installed in arid Las Vegas in her father-in-law’s home while her husband returned to his business—and the orchids and monkeys and birds of paradise—in Brazil. This was Las Vegas in the 1920s, a dusty frontier town of 5,000 people. When Louise strolled down Carson Street to post her letters at the end of the day the cowboys and miners got off their horses to whistle as the Frenchwoman passed. She lasted four years, the better part of two of them in a Santa Fe sanitorium.

  Exile had the same effect on Louise de Vilmorin as it had on her ex-fiancé: she became a writer. Her first novel appeared—with Gallimard, thanks to Saint-Exupéry, who introduced her to the Lestrange pipeline—in 1934; she would publish fourteen novels and three volumes of poetry before her death in 1969. The dedications say a good deal about their author: Among others, her works are offered as tributes to Orson Welles, René Clair, and Jean Cocteau. A great number of men, many with celebrated names, waited at the bottom of a great number of staircases for Louise de Vilmorin, who left no heads unturned. “She knew the sesame for smiles, the sole password to the heart,” wrote Saint-Exupéry of the heroine of his first novel, Southern Mail. Or as another admirer put it, “She was a woman who well understood the profession of women: to put men through the paces.”

  Years later, in one of the odd coincidences that would forever link together the names of two men who had little to say to each other in their lifetimes, Louise de Vilmorin became the companion of André Malraux, with whom she had had a brief liaison in the 1930s. With sly accuracy she referred to herself as “Marilyn Malraux.” The writer and statesman was a domineering man and Louise’s was not an easy role: “Her union with Malraux,” commented the same admirer, “was like the marriage of a bird and an elephant.” At the end of her life, still living with Malraux, she volunteered the names of the five men she had truly loved. Neither of her two husbands, nor Malraux, nor Saint-Exupéry made the list.*

  ~

  The role Louise de Vilmorin played in Saint-Exupéry’s sentimental life has been disputed—though never by the men who knew him intimately—but the role she played in his literature is unassailable. Much of the heartbreak over Louise is to be found embedded in Southern Mail, a novel that grew like sedimentary rock, the first layer of which probably dates from 1924. Saint-Exupéry had always believed in fairy princesses and now he had known one. The women in his books—aside from Fabian’s wife in Night Flight, herself described as a little girl—would generally amount to frail, childlike wood sprites, more part of the animal kingdom than of the world of man. Although the published novel is not, the manuscript of Southern Mail is indeed dedicated to Louise, for whom Saint-Exupéry confessed he had in part written the book. (The typescript of the story of Bark from Wind, Sand a
nd Stars was also dedicated to Louise. Saint-Exupéry was never to dedicate a published book to a woman, however.) Southern Mail was in fact a twin tribute, one part written to Louise, one part to aviation, with results as mixed as had been those of the Swiss marriage of padded upholsteries and wind currents. The novel’s two primary layers—the love story and the tracking of the ill-fated Paris—Dakar mail—are not, as the critics observed, well-integrated. It is hardly a great novel, but it is a healthy exorcism.

  Jacques Bernis, who first appears in “L’Aviateur,” and the narrator, mail pilots both, are best friends. The two have lived under the spell of Geneviève since their childhoods. She was their princess of the lindens, the oaks, the flocks; she was the “frail child,” the “little girl,” the “underwater fairy.” She is a thinly disguised Louise, although Saint-Exupéry may also have been thinking of his golden-haired sister Gabrielle. Geneviève was the wellspring of the two men’s childhoods, and as the novel opens she appears older, at least chronologically, unhappily married to the pompous Herlin, an insensitive bourgeois who neither appreciates nor understands his prize. After the sudden death of their child—clearly modeled on Gabrielle d’Agay’s loss of her son in 1925—she allows the mighty Bernis, “the heavy-footed explorer,” to spirit her, “light-footed as the moon,” away, an effort that the novel’s narrator knows to be futile. Geneviève’s existence is founded on “a habit of fortune, of which she’s un-aware,” and despite his best intentions Bernis is going to empty her life of “the 1,000 objects one no longer noticed but of which it was composed.” Love is one thing, living quite another; Bernis is taking Geneviève away from her Verrières. The narrator’s thoughts here are one of the few tributes to pragmatism in the work of Saint-Exupéry, who had clearly learned a lesson from Louise.

  The practical world indeed conspires against Jacques Bernis, as it would often enough against his creator. As Bernis carries his prize off into the night, away from Paris and Herlin, the car headlights work badly, the heavens open, a sparkplug dies. He finds he has forgotten a flashlight. The hotels in Sens are shut, or have no vacancies. Freedom proves elusive for Geneviève. She is inextricable from the world of Persian rugs, the bric-a-brac, the well-pressed linens, to which Bernis returns her after a night in a third-rate hotel. “It was as if I had been trying to drag her down beneath the sea,” he tells the narrator; their “underwater fairy” turns out to be no mermaid. For Bernis, the sweet enchanted world of which Geneviève was meant to be guardian proves irretrievable as well. Even later, Saint-Exupéry seemed unable to forgive women their growing up. “The day dawns when the woman wakes in the young girl … and then an imbecile comes along.… And the imbecile drags off the princess into slavery,” he would write in Wind, Sand and Stars. It is clear from Southern Mail that Saint-Exupéry saw in Louise not the great enchantress, not “the smile of superiority, the face which reminded me of all the paintings of French history depicting aristocracy and pride,” described by Anaïs Nin, but a kind of child-goddess, a force of nature.

  Southern Mail is the only one of Saint-Exupéry’s works in which a female character plays a substantial role, unless one counts the rose in The Little Prince, the offshoot of another love. Even then the story of the Little Prince and his vain, capricious flower speaks to the debacle that was the Louise affair: It is the misunderstanding with the rose that sends the prince off on his voyage to the planet Earth. Unwittingly Louise in effect supplied the rose’s lines in a poem appearing in a volume called L’Écho des Fantaisies: “Love me, I am pretty and wise / And will renounce all vanity / If you will take me at your side / To the land of realities.” Her work is less easy to parse for signs of the grounded aviator—her sentimental life having been declared one of the most tumultuous of the century—but it should be noted that in the 1958 Lettre dans un taxi, a passionless and appropriate marriage also survives the assault of true love.

  This was ironic in light of Louise’s famous inconstancy. Saint-Exupéry accused her of having an urgent need for a world “in which no action leaves a trace; you feel a near-animal anguish in leaving your footprint on the sand. You are made to live at the bottom of the seas, where no movement disturbs the surface,” a judgment with which her brother André concurred. In the end, however, it is Bernis, as he disappears for good over the Sahara, who becomes lighter than air, who leaves no impression on sands so forgiving that they scarcely “retain the light imprint of a child.” The light-footed Geneviève leaves an unmistakable trace on the life of Bernis, as the sprightly Louise leaves footprints all over the work of the aviator whom she brings down to earth. It turned out to be she who was bound to the stable world of objects and he who thrived on the ethereal.

  ~

  Louise de Vilmorin’s legacy was an ironic one. The effect of the affair was to plunge her ex-fiancé more deeply into the bourgeois world that was anathema to him. From the fall of 1923 to the fall of 1924 he reported every morning to a fifth-floor cubicle at the offices of the Tuileries Boiron. It did not take him long to conclude that “I wasn’t made for a twenty-square-foot office”; he referred to this office as his cage. He occupied himself with the bookkeeping and with the filing, a task that seemed to him particularly onerous given the fact that the papers he so carefully filed away were never again consulted.

  His primary occupation consisted of the futile effort of urging on the hands of his watch. He waxed supremely eloquent on the subject of boredom: “I’ve tried every trick to make time fly; I am now a master of the subject,” he bragged to Sallès. Staring out the window at the brick wall on the other side of the courtyard proved an ineffective method; the best was to leave an urgent task until the last minute when, with a supervisor breathing down his neck, the clock hands flew like those of a windmill. “It is precisely 11:10. It is precisely 11:11. It is precisely 11:12. I feel as if I am climbing an interminable staircase. It is precisely 11:13 and several seconds.… When I think that a little while ago it was four minutes to eleven it gives me hope; I will probably make it to noon.” He had no colleagues to whom he could complain; his best friend was the second hand on his watch, the only one that consistently offered the sense that time was indeed passing. He was free for two hours at midday, during which he could, he wrote Sallès, lunch, visit anarchist clubs, make love. Only he had three francs fifty to his name; he would be virtuous and pretend he was being so on principle.

  He readily confessed that the job suited him “like an evening gown.” His employers were not oblivious to this fact. Saint-Exupéry was forced to abandon his habit of sleeping at his desk—a foolproof method of passing the time—when his boss and a group of executives paid the slumbering employee a visit one day. Some very curious looks must have been exchanged when Saint-Exupéry, startled back to consciousness, awoke with a shriek of “Maman!” The management may have thought him crazy but kept him on, and even indulged him a little. In the summer of 1924 he was dispatched to the company’s booth at the Paris Fair, where he presented their wares with great dignity. “You would laugh to see me there,” he wrote his mother. He himself must have laughed when the company asked him to take some aerial photographs of their factory that June.

  The letters sparkle, but the life did not. The young bureaucrat was virtually homeless, bunking in for a few months with Captain Priou, now returned from Morocco, in his apartment on the rue Petit near the Buttes-Chaumont, later making his way from one modest hotel to another. More than anything else he yearned for a place he could call his own, where he could cultivate some of the “douce intimité” Louise had provided and on which he thrived. He played the lottery, although the lucky star that was to shine with uncanny constancy on Saint-Exupéry the aviator in distress made no appearance now. The hope that it might, at least, kept him afloat. “Like a broken heart, it keeps you busy,” he wrote.

  He realized he was stuck—the full impact of his failed exams must have hit him now, as his friends were collecting their advanced degrees—and cast about for a way out of his quandary. One
of the few remaining prospects seemed to be journalism, but he had no time to do the reporting (nor for that matter any aptitude for this kind of detail), and the columns open to stringers were hardly enticing. Early in 1924 he heard that China was recruiting flight instructors and thought this might be the answer to his pecuniary difficulties. Doubtless he picked up this bit of news, which came to nothing, at Orly, where he had begun flying again on the occasional Sunday. Twelve hundred feet above the ground, communing with his motor, he was able to forget the miseries of a life that had kept him so much off balance. It was the only subject on which he seemed still inclined to ambitious reverie. “When I am rich,” he resolved in a letter to Gabrielle, “I will have a little airplane of my own and will come to visit you at Saint-Raphaël.”

  He remained, however, as threadbare as ever. His spirits could not have been improved by the news that his mother needed to sell Saint-Maurice—the house had quickly become a financial burden—although he promised to help her do so and thought he might be able to take advantage of the expected arrival of 300,000 Americans in Paris for the 1924 summer Olympics. It was perhaps this news that was responsible for the acute regret he now evinced at the bills he piled up. He began to sound as tired of asking for money as his mother must have been tired of fielding his requests. He made several trips to Saint-Maurice—including one that summer with friends and a second in the fall—but kept all travel to a minimum in light of his limited resources. On one occasion he painfully explained to his mother that were he to journey to the south he would only be forced to ask her again for money the day of his return to Paris. He was equally apologetic with Didi, who had a baby in August and who wrote him asking for a visit. A ticket to the Midi would claim half his monthly salary; to his sister he explained the constraints on his life and replied wistfully that in the course of fifteen months he had seen her only for three days. (The following year the count was equally dispiriting: eight days in two years. “I will probably get to be 100 without having seen the inside of your house or met my nephew again,” he wrote.) He accepted an invitation to visit his cousins in Le Mans primarily because it would spare him his living expenses for four days. “I am the most discouraged man in the world,” he wrote that summer, probably just before his sister Marie-Madeleine was diagnosed as suffering from epilepsy.