Saint-exupery: A Biography

by Stacy Schiff

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  In the summer General Édouard Barès, who not only oversaw the Centre d’Études d’Aéronautiques at Versailles but also commanded military aviation in the Paris region, lent a hand, arranging for Saint-Exupéry to join the Compagnie Aérienne Française (CAF), a commercial airline specializing in tourist flights at Le Bourget. (General Barès had long been, by way of both his mother and sister, a Saint-Exupéry family friend; his word with the CAF—staffed primarily with army-trained pilots—was golden.) The position marked a turning point for Saint-Exupéry: for the first time he was to fly for a living. On June 23 he received his airline transport rating, still a relatively rare license that permitted its bearer to carry passengers. In retrospect he acknowledged the General’s intervention as the godsend it was: without him, Saint-Exupéry wrote in Barès’s copy of Wind, Sand and Stars, he would not have entered commercial aviation, would not have known the métier, would never have flown with Aéropostale, or written this book.

  On July 10 Saint-Exupéry began a series of training flights on a Dorand AM-1, a biplane that had been produced in quantity for wartime reconnaissance missions. Two weeks later he took up his first passenger for a scenic circuit over Paris, a flight that would have cost about 150 francs. It lasted twenty-two minutes. Aerial baptisms lasted for six, and he generally did not fly more than twice daily; his logbook began, like a dance card, to fill up with these short excursions, but his was not a hugely demanding life. He rarely spent more than an hour in the air a day and did not work regularly, which left him plenty of time to visit with his friends. Probably he flew as often as any other CAF pilot; he brought the same fierce logic with which he had so often bullied Escot to bear on Madame Fontaine, the CAF manager in charge of flight assignments. “Madame, let me fly! I will give you cigarettes!” proposed the new recruit. “Monsieur, I don’t smoke, but you may do the next baptism!” promised the incorruptible Madame Fontaine.

  The CAF position provided some consolation during a difficult summer. Marie-Madeleine had died during the first week of June, in the end of tuberculosis, and Madame de Saint-Exupéry did not bear the loss of her firstborn easily. From the lack of correspondence between Saint-Exupéry and his mother it seems fair to speculate that he spent some portion of the early summer in Saint-Maurice. There is no record of where he lodged in Paris at the end of his Saurer tenure; although he gave the Titania as his address on at least one occasion the hotel’s ledgers show him as having ended his stay there in late 1925. He may have camped out again on the quai Malaquais. He was no more flush, on the CAF’s meager wage, than he had been before. While he had a published story to his credit these were years when it took a good deal to set the literary world on end; he had hardly done so, and did in any event not dwell on this success. His family alone allowed itself to be impressed by his publication: Saint-Exupéry complained to Escot that the relatives who had so long despaired of him had suddenly begun to search him out. (It should be said that these were the same relatives who had generously offered him funds and lodging in the past.) Moreover, Le Navire had, with its May issue, ceased publication. Its year of life had so bankrupted Adrienne Monnier that in mid-May she was forced to sell her private library—“with sadness and humiliation”—to meet the expenses. Again and again the world seemed to disappear out from behind Saint-Exupéry; as much as the theme of his work was progress the theme of his life was often nostalgia. There was something sadly appropriate about the fact that he should make his literary debut in Le Navire’s penultimate issue.

  Famously, Paris played host to a batch of young expatriates who, in music and letters and café life, reenergized the city. The Surrealists drank loudly at the Dome; George Antheil, Paul Robeson, and Josephine Baker sent the musical and theatrical worlds spinning; the book-making on the rue de l’Odéon further kept the neighborhood humming. American jazz was, however, the wrong soundtrack in 1926 for Saint-Exupéry, who was beginning to feel his age. This was partly in contrast to his friends, who had now begun to settle down; partly because he was losing his hair, a fact that had troubled him for several years, although if anything he now seemed to have grown into his awkward body and was better-looking than he had been. He wrote his mother that nothing made him happier than an exclamation over his youth; he needed terribly to feel young. There was no disguising his loneliness. More and more often he expressed a desire to marry. He was sick of “this perpetually temporary life”; he wanted children, “beaucoup de petits Antoines.” However, he lamented, he had only met one woman to whom he had been tempted to make this commitment.

  On the subject of domestic bliss Saint-Exupéry was of two minds. He wavered between thinking of being ill at ease as an artistic advantage and as a disease. He told his mother that what he hoped for in a woman was above all someone who could calm his anxiety. “That’s what one needs most. You cannot imagine how life weighs heavily, how useless one’s youth can feel. You cannot imagine what a woman can offer, what she would be able to offer,” he wrote to one woman who surely did know. In the same letter he admitted he feared the stultifying comforts of marriage. He had noticed that the settled, satisfied man failed to develop further, a criticism he leveled against one friend in particular. Already he held in disdain the kind of person he—and the Little Prince—termed “mushrooms”; many years later he defined this type as he who, clinging to a tree of which he is wholly unaware, naively pursues his “unreal little existence.” Later, too, he would complain that when his friends settled down they were entirely lost to him: “All my friends get married, after which things are different: they build their little barriers. Then I always have the feeling of being left out.” He despaired of ever finding a woman who would be right for him and was disappointed over and over again. (The qualifications as he outlined them for his sister Gabrielle were stringent: his “petite jeune fille” had to be beautiful, intelligent, charming, serene, calming, and loyal.) His mother found him far too critical; he replied that he was demanding of himself and that it was therefore within his rights to be demanding of others. He was now in the market for an intelligent woman who only liked intelligent people, a woman who could comfort but not dull him. Surely this was not too much to ask?

  His high standards did not preclude romance. Saint-Exupéry flirted and dated in Paris as he had during his year as a traveling salesman, characteristically reporting only on the failed conquests. These included the hat seller in Dompierre-sur-Besbre and a Czech manicurist so pretty he had been forced to profess his love. (“You are not the first,” came the pert reply.) He had had his eye on a small but voluptuous Saurer secretary who would not give him the time of day. He spent some time with the sister of a friend’s fiancée, Lucie-Marie Decour, blond, stunning, conservatory-trained, and at least for a time enchanted by his storytelling; she would prove a loyal correspondent later. In 1925 a Russian fortuneteller had read his cards and predicted an imminent marriage with a young widow he would meet within eight days. He was intrigued, but his young widow was to keep him waiting for seven more years.

  His friends were again his consolation, although they were increasingly, to his frustration, officers, professionals, husbands. (Ségogne was married this year; Bonnevie had not only completed Centrale but been an army lieutenant since the previous year; Saussine had gone on to Navale and was made an officer in 1924.) He began to grow more attached to Renée de Saussine, who, oblivious to his growing affection, saw him regularly over the summer. She was an accomplished musician and shared as well a lively interest in literature, serving as an early reader for her friend’s work. Only later did Saint-Exupéry realize that he had been in love with her—this was a very different love from what he had felt and continued to feel for Louise de Vilmorin, much more of an amitié amoureuse. Ségogne was far quicker to see the affair develop; because of the Louise fiasco, Saint-Exupéry refused to admit to any tenderness. Throughout the second half of 1926 he nonetheless wrote Renée routinely to say he was exasperated by her uncommunicativeness and would never wr
ite her another letter, only to sit down before the week was out to do so again. In 1927 he was ready to concede that he had indeed felt love for her and that he had been sadly disappointed, having unwittingly “trop aventuré mon coeur” (Renée de Saussine—who that year began to win acclaim in Europe and South America as a concert violinist and who went on to publish several volumes of her own, including a biography of Paganini—never married.) In Paris, on a meager salary and with no home of his own, Saint-Exupéry muddled by, more lonely than alone. “Drearily I court these Colettes and Paulettes and Lucys and Daisys and Gabys, all of whom resemble each other, all of whom bore me at the end of two hours,” he wrote Gabrielle. He termed these women his “waiting rooms.” He was in a stall, like Jacques Bernis, in search of a plot. And then in September, suddenly, superbly, the wait was over.

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  The aerial baptism business was not brisk, and Saint-Exupéry’s CAF salary offered scant relief from his financial worries. A pilot seeking to earn a living in 1926 would have been well-advised to turn to the mail lines, which had begun to function just after the war and were now generating some excitement, in France especially, where they were among the most advanced. Passenger transport no longer amounted to airline-supplied hot-water bottles, gloves, goggles, and greatcoats, but it remained an expensive, deafening, irritating, chilling—in both senses of the word—experience, far more stylish than comfortable. It had only just established its operational viability; the main call for commercial pilots was in the burgeoning mail industry. In the summer of 1926 Saint-Exupéry prevailed upon Abbé Sudour, the Bossuet mentor who had so often encouraged his literary efforts and with whom he had remained in touch, to put in a word for him with Sudour’s old friend Beppo de Massimi, the general manager of the Compagnie Latécoère, France’s most ambitious mail line. In doing so he was unwittingly following the counsel of a postwar text evaluating the best professions in which to make a fortune. The publication touted commerce and industry as the careers of the future but warned that all desirable jobs were obtained through influence, patronage, and luck, as was to be Saint-Exupéry’s case. By September, Sudour—whom Saint-Exupéry had evidently pestered repeatedly—had arranged an interview for him with the Latécoère manager. That same month Charles Lindbergh, carrying the New York mail from St. Louis to Chicago in a decrepit World War I de Havilland biplane—exactly like the one he had crashed a week earlier in an Illinois field—began to think about what he could do in a more reliable plane, given fuel enough and time.

  Both highly cultivated men, Sudour and Massimi had known each other in the trenches of the Somme, where the soldier-priest and the Italian count (Massimi had flown as a volunteer) had talked literature. After the war the two men remained close; Massimi had entrusted his son to Sudour’s care at Bossuet. The Abbé could not and did not vouch for his former student’s skill as a pilot but sang his praises as a writer to the manager of the company, adding that Saint-Exupéry’s only ambition, despite the promise he had already displayed in the field of letters, was to become an airline pilot. This intrigued Massimi, himself a playwright and translator. In his seven years with Latécoère he had hired mostly wartime aces for the company.

  Massimi met with his friend’s protégé in Paris, probably during the first days of October, and never forgot the impression made on him by “this tall young man who seemed terribly conscious of his size and annoyed at taking up so much room in his chair.” He seemed to suffer from amnesia; he was incapable of discussing anything that might have reflected well on him. Only on the subject of the airline and its day-to-day operations did he spring to life. Under other circumstances it might well have been an interview without sequel. Massimi told Saint-Exupéry that he would have to submit to a series of tests in Toulouse, where the firm was based. Were he to fly well he would be allowed to pilot for a certain period on one of the Latécoère lines then being prospected. “And then?” asked the candidate, sounding worried. “And then … well!” temporized the Italian, taken aback by the question. “Our operations director needs a lieutenant.” He was interrupted by Saint-Exupéry, red-faced and sputtering. “Monsieur, I especially want to fly … only to fly.” He made it clear that he would be willing to leave for Toulouse that evening. Massimi, for whom this was in all ways an exceptional interview, was moved by his ardor. He could not make the candidate any promises but agreed to put in a call to Toulouse to see what could be arranged. He expected then to talk to Saint-Exupéry about his writing, but the author of “L’Aviateur” was already halfway out the door.

  Either in this meeting or during a subsequent conversation Saint-Exupéry was told he would be summoned by letter to Toulouse; it was agreed that the offer of employment would be sent to him at his sister’s home in Agay, and that week, having submitted to the obligatory medical exam at Le Bourget, he packed his bags. His spirits did not soar as he said his Parisian good-byes. He felt defeated by a city that held out so many promises and kept none; from this point on Paris would represent a gilded cage for him. He took full responsibility for his failures, which made him feel worse: “I’m not a very nice guy. I’m good only to be packed off alone to some far-off line, the farthest off,” he wrote Renée de Saussine in a note accompanying a manuscript of what was probably an unpublished short story called “Manon Danseuse.” This story—a Jean Rhys—like tale of the unhappy affair of a Pigalle dancer and a man twice her age, images from which were presumably layered into Southern Mail—he also shared with an ex-professor before his departure.

  The move from Paris exhausted him. He was unable to detach himself from a host of odd objects for which he had no use but suddenly experienced an irresistible need; he had a long series of errands to run; the storage of his heavy trunks was a complicated affair. As if in revenge, he never put down roots again. In the end, all arrangements made, he was left with fifteen empty minutes before he needed to leave for the station. He spent them alone on the quai Malaquais. It was late afternoon; his friends had all deserted him for films and concerts and the countryside. His head ached, he could feel a cold coming on; he had Renée de Saussine and their not-altogether-satisfying friendship on his mind. In his hat and coat he sank uncomfortably into an armchair, where his melancholy got the better of him. He did not look like a man finally about to embark on his future.

  On October 11 the letter from the airline’s owner, Pierre-Georges Latécoère, arrived in Agay, summoning Saint-Exupéry to the Montaudran airfield outside of Toulouse. As was standard procedure, he was to bring with him his licenses, his logbook, and a passport valid for travel to Spain. He was requested to report to Didier Daurat—Monsieur Daurat to all who knew him—the company’s operations director. Saint-Exupéry borrowed the train fare from his family and made his way immediately to Toulouse. On the fourteenth he stood before Daurat, the man he would render immortal in a portrait so powerful that the airline director would spend the rest of his life attempting to detach himself from his fictional alter ego. Daurat can only be said to have returned the favor.

  Didier Daurat, a hero of Verdun, from which battle he emerged with the Croix de Guerre, five citations, and a collection of shrapnel; a man who convalesced by earning his pilot’s license and wound up as a fighter squadron leader in 1917; the only surviving pilot of sixty-four after the second battle of the Marne in 1918; the flyer who located Big Bertha from the air, and the man who devoted twelve years to building what was to become the most extensive airmail operation in the world by 1930; Daurat—who died at seventy-nine in 1969, having created an ill-fated airline of his own and having spent five years as chief of Air France’s operations at Orly—was quizzed about no moment of his distinguished life more often than about his first meeting with Saint-Exupéry. True to his reputation for perfect precision, he offered up the story with little variation. And true to his reputation for conciseness—it was said that no conversation with him lasted for more than three minutes—he left a certain amount unsaid. Daurat, who had signed on with Latécoère in August of 19
19 and had himself flown the first Toulouse/Rabat mail that September, was, at all times, a man with a mission. For him it was said the war had not ended, it had only changed fields. He was to turn an industrialist’s quixotic dream into a reality. “People write every day,” Pierre-Georges Latécoère had observed. “The mail service doesn’t make sense unless it, too, is daily.” If the trick of most of life is to make some event of the day-to-day, to fan some spark of the unusual in the quotidian, the challenge of the early airmails was to make the quotidian as eventless, as usual as possible. This was the methodical Daurat’s accomplishment; it was the mission he instilled in the bedraggled group of war veterans and young Turks who had assembled, Lord of the Rings—style, in Toulouse, and who were to become France’s first set of post—World War I heroes. These included the young man who now stood before Daurat, to whom such a philosophy was so foreign that he arrived an hour late for his interview.

  The thickset Daurat, a cigarette glued to his lips, received Saint-Exupéry in his austere office at the airfield just before lunch. His desk had long since disappeared under a sea of paper; behind him hung a huge map of Spain across which were flung a series of colored lines. His trademark attire, indoors and out, included a wilting felt hat, a rumpled raincoat, and a five-o’clock shadow. Daurat’s welcome to other pilots has been described as glacial; it is doubtful that Saint-Exupéry’s greeting was any warmer, given what the director admitted were some misgivings about the newcomer with the lily-white hands. His logbook was thin, not much more impressive, Daurat noted in his memoirs, than that of a hobby pilot. Two years earlier Daurat had refused to be impressed with Jean Mermoz’s 600 flying hours, as much as twice as many as Saint-Exupéry had amassed at this time. (By comparison, Charles Lindbergh, who had also been flying since 1922, had by this autumn logged close to 2,000 hours in the air.) Saint-Exupéry’s logbook would also have included his accident at Le Bourget, which the director presumably asked him to explain. More worrisome, Daurat noticed that this young man “possessed a clear moral and intellectual distinction; he seemed more inclined to dreaming than made for flying.” He spoke with the soft voice of a poet. In a field that invited hubris he was anything but self-assertive. He carried himself awkwardly; Daurat noticed the same lack of grace that had so much concerned the mothers of eligible young women. What Daurat looked for in a pilot was evidence of débrouillardise, or resourcefulness. He was one of the first arbiters of “the right stuff.”