Saint-exupery: A Biography

by Stacy Schiff

  The pilot of the 1920s was less a scientist or an engineer than an adventurer. Flyers were still widely considered marginal characters by the public; not too much earlier Louis Breguet had been told that it was preferable he abandon himself to drink than continue to build aircraft. No one yet believed entirely in air transport, and no one had less reason to, observed Daurat, than the pilots themselves. They knew better than anyone the limits of their fragile machines; they could not imagine how these unreliable contraptions were one day going to be asked to cross oceans. In the first years of the mails Daurat had been obliged to fire an excellent pilot when, returning to Toulouse from Casablanca, the pilot had been forced down on a Spanish beach by bad weather and had had the poor judgment to advise his passenger: “You should take the boat! It’s so much safer.” Daurat had no reason to be convinced of Saint-Exupéry’s professional aptitude; there was even less proof that Saint-Exupéry would bring the required brand of confident, even-tempered tenacity to the job.

  The director had further reason to be wary. Sudour, whom Daurat had known as well at the front, had indeed said kind things about his ex-pupil, but the point of a recommendation, observed the matter-of-fact Daurat later, is after all to say kind things. While the priest’s word was good, it carried less weight on an airstrip than in the intellectual village of the 6th arrondissement, where Saint-Exupéry looked very much to belong. What was more, Daurat could not entirely overlook the fact that Saint-Exupéry came to him via his aristocratic colleague. On this he commented tersely: “Massimi referred him to me; they shared la particule.” Massimi had dropped his, but Daurat noticed that Sudour’s protégé signed always “de Saint-Exupéry.” He was the only one of Daurat’s approximately seventy pilots who could do so.

  Why, then, did he take Saint-Exupéry on, at least provisionally, sending him on to the workshops where all pilots began? Perhaps he was intrigued; perhaps he felt a certain amount of sympathy, although this was hardly the virtue for which Daurat was best known. He may simply have needed a pilot (of the 126 flyers recruited between 1923 and 1926, fifty-five had left the company and seven had died in the line of duty). He knew as well as anyone that good pilots come in all brands, and he had little to lose. He claimed to have felt acutely Saint-Exupéry’s need for a success during their short interview. In Daurat’s view the only realm in which the young man had made any headway was in society; he could not have known that this had been a very qualified success. He suspected that what had first struck him as affectation in the young man was in fact shyness, pure and simple. This was not what he expected to find in a man like Saint-Exupéry, but modesty was a more promising quality than pretension or overconfidence, which he abhorred. (When Mermoz went up for his first flight test in a Breguet 14, he took it upon himself to perform acrobatics for Daurat. He was very nearly fired before being hired.) The exacting chief, known for being a stickler about schedules, the devotion to which after all constituted his life’s work, chose to forgive the applicant who had arrived at noon for an eleven o’clock interview, a crime of which Saint-Exupéry must quickly have realized the gravity. Under Daurat’s care, that same man, only partially reformed, would write of his first day with the mail line: “I learned that any delay is a dishonor, regardless of why it occurs.”

  ~

  Saint-Exupéry began his Latécoère career as a mechanic. Daurat had designed this apprenticeship with an eye to the war veterans who filled the bulk of the airline’s original ranks. Most of them lived off their remembered glories; Daurat felt he needed to strip them of their bulky “armor of pride” and teach them to appreciate routine, monotony, teamwork. Many of the veterans found this training beneath them; the ex-Saurer mechanic did not. During his first weeks with Latécoère, decked out once again in workman’s blues, Saint-Exupéry learned to wield a wrench, to dismantle a motor, to check for oil and water leaks, to anticipate a ruptured connecting rod, to weld and clean cylinders. Daurat was pleasantly surprised by the quick transformation of the new recruit’s manicured hands, which came for him to represent the transfiguration of the man himself, whom Daurat saw as propelled by his earlier ordeals to turn a passion into a profession. What was more, even Saint-Exupéry’s much-noted clumsiness could not mask a remarkable aptitude for mechanics.

  He was on familiar turf. The Breguet 14—the warplane that was the staple of the Latécoère fleet in 1926 and 1927 and in which Saint-Exupéry would perform his feats at Juby—was hardly more complicated a machine than was a Saurer truck. A total of 5,500 biplanes had been built during the war, equipped as either light bombers or reconnaissance planes; nearly 150 were purchased by the United States, to whose de Havilland D.H.4B the Breguet probably best compared. It was not an aircraft that rivaled other fighter craft in its appearance or its prestige; it was neither rapid (its cruising speed was eighty miles per hour, half that of a French high-speed train today) nor particularly manageable. But a Breguet 14 A2 was the most reliable aircraft of the time, which was to say that it broke down only every 15,500 miles traveled or, by another gauge, that it flew well even with an incomplete wing or with only half its pistons firing. It was an aircraft with which Saint-Exupéry had some experience, in part thanks to his enterprising outings with Escot at Villacoublay. Several weeks after his arrival in Toulouse he submitted to his first flight test, which he passed, though Daurat deemed the performance to have been “without brio.” There was ample room for improvement, and over the course of the next training flights Saint-Exupéry made steady progress. Daurat followed this progress especially closely, not because he meant to cosset the man who would become the bard of the airline, but, conversely, because he had more reason to worry about Saint-Exupéry than about most of his new recruits.

  Daurat was not the only one at Montaudran watching Saint-Exupéry carefully. All young pilots were looked upon with suspicion by the war veterans, who accepted them only grudgingly. But among his fellow greenhorns Saint-Exupéry stood out as well, initially because of his name and his decidedly bohemian airs, soon enough because of his famous capriciousness. He was not taken altogether seriously. Léon Antoine, a young pilot who had arrived at Latécoère earlier in the year, remembered a morning when Saint-Exupéry did not appear to board the tram that carried the pilots from their Toulouse hotel to the airstrip, a capital offense. Someone ran up to his room to see what was keeping him; the truant was discovered asleep in his bath, a book floating in the water before him. Such tales circulated quickly. Later, at a Spanish airfield, the man who was to write odes to the punctuality of the early airmails announced just before he was meant to take off that he could not do so. “Are you sick?” asked the chief of the airfield. “No, but I forgot my gloves at the hotel,” explained Saint-Exupéry. “You will leave without gloves, my friend!” he was advised tartly. One of the historians of the line noted that men with no sense of time in their personal lives adopted a rigorous exactitude when it came to the mail. Those who resisted were forced to adapt to the discipline by their colleagues, “like skeptics lost in a religious community.” Saint-Exupéry submitted with near relief to the metaphor, if not always to the practice. “When I joined the Aéropostale Service,” he wrote six years later, “I felt that I was entering a monastery.”

  The Latécoère cloister was to be found just off Toulouse’s main square, eight miles from the airstrip, at the corner of the rue Romiguières and the rue des Lois. The Grand Balcon, a five-story hotel built of the pink brick that makes France’s southwestern capital glow with rosy light early in the morning and at the end of an afternoon, offered respectable rooms with board at seven francs a night. (For a special client, like the ferociously handsome Mermoz, the rate could go as low as five francs nightly.) Along with two additional restaurants, Le Site and Les PyréAnées, which also housed aviators, the hotel came to serve as the Latécoère priory, probably for the simple reason that Toulouse boasted few hotels at the time and this affordable one was on the Montaudran tramline. (Toto, the Juby mechanic, as partial to liquids in Fra
nce as in the desert, would stumble to the airfield after an all-night bender by tapping his way blindly along the rail with a cane.) Three unmarried women, two of them sisters, ran the benevolent pension, which by the time Saint-Exupéry arrived was entirely overrun by the vagabondish Latécoère family. Just as important to the newcomer, the hotel was a stone’s throw from Toulouse’s best cafés, all on or near the place du Capitole or the place Wilson. From here he kept up a busy correspondence during his first six months on la Ligne; a great number of these envelopes were addressed to Renée de Saussine. At the Grand Balcon the fortunate Saint-Exupéry was assigned a spacious fourth-floor room with a fireplace and two windows, overlooking the square.

  Daurat, who lived in town with his wife, arrived at the Montaudran field in the company car at 4:00 a.m. The mail arrived, by overnight train from Paris’s Gare d’Orsay and by truck, at 8:00. The Latécoère crew waited in front of the Grand Balcon for the number 10 tram; by the time it rattled to the door of the hotel a group of men had assembled on the pavement in the dark, their hands stuffed in the pockets of their leather jackets, cigarettes dangling from their mouths. Off they rode to Montaudran, where their holy orders were sealed in oil, in boring but critical meteorology lessons held in a freezing hangar, in fear of the labors to be accomplished and in awe at those who had already accomplished them. (In all, 120 employees died in the service of the mail line, an average of about ten men a year.) The streetcar dropped the pilots a quarter-mile from the field; this final stretch was covered on foot. Saint-Exupéry made a practice of stopping in at Le Site, at the end of the line. Marius Fabre, an eagle-eyed Latécoère mechanic, noticed that a ritual evolved around the pilot’s two-croissant-and-café-au-lait breakfast: When Saint-Exupéry was broke he discreetly sat down at Le Site with the mechanics, who understood they were to treat him to his one-franc meal. “But, on the other hand, when he was flush, he conducted himself royally and bought breakfast not only for our table but for all the others,” remembered Fabre.

  Saint-Exupéry rose to the challenge of this new life with gusto, although the work was not always transcendent or even remotely glamorous. He moved on from his mechanic’s stage to flying the Breguets as they were delivered, which was irregularly. One Friday he took a new airplane up for an hour’s test flight at 300 feet in heavy rain, a flight during which he observed that aviation resembled nothing more than taking a bath. That Sunday he woke at six to take up another plane but was forced down (as he put it, the aircraft “manifested the imperious desire to return to the stable”) after ten minutes, because of which he spent the rest of the day bored and half-asleep. He bought matches, cigarettes, and stamps so as to have something to do; he reported that he already had thirty boxes of matches and enough stamps for the next forty years in his room. His salary was probably close to 1,000 francs a month—his first letter home from Toulouse was the last in which he lobbied for money—but once he began flying he would have found that no distinction existed among week-days, weekends, and holidays. The previous year Mermoz had reported flying 600-mile, seven-hour days, with one day off for every two he worked. Still, Saint-Exupéry was far from disconsolate. The departure of the mail at dawn, under a light drizzle, was a beautiful sight, and he was quick to appreciate a brand of aviation that seemed less a sport than a kind of war. The danger, the pioneering aspect of the venture, the sacrifice for the greater, abstract good, and the transient lifestyle brought a man out of himself, something Saint-Exupéry had complained he had trouble doing on his own. “One is who one is, but this is sometimes limited,” he had written his mother. Under the weight of greater responsibility, yoked into a team, he began to rise above his melancholy. It is not easy to resist the triple lure of a demanding family that with its own creed wages a very personal war, and Saint-Exupéry—who may have needed these structures more than most of the Latécoère personnel—bought in hook, line, and sinker. Though the religious trappings were there for all to see, he began to distill and romanticize the spiritual dimensions of his new life. This time the nonjoiner—having found a cause worthy of his ideals, or simply having run out of options—became a zealot.

  After several weeks of flying new aircraft and after a number of flights to Perpignan, just under two hours from Toulouse, Saint-Exupéry was sent off as a passenger on the Toulouse-Barcelona-Alicante line, halfway to Casablanca along the Latécoère route. His pilot was Henri Guillaumet, whom Mermoz had brought to the company—the two had met during their military service—during the winter of 1925. Guillaumet was the recipient of two of the hardest-won accolades in Latécoère history. Daurat thought him the best pilot he had known. And the stern chief, who held that a pilot lost three-quarters of his value when he married, allowed that Guillaumet was the sole exception to his rule. (This was perhaps more of a tribute to Madame Guillaumet.) Two years younger than Saint-Exupéry, Guillaumet was a man of no visible ego. He was frank and humble and taciturn. Mermoz, too, was a quiet man and a hero—among his innumerable breathtaking feats he had once risked his life for a corpse—but he had a certain vanity. Arguably this was through no fault of his own: Mermoz was a man of such godlike good looks that when he first arrived in Toulouse even Daurat felt compelled to comment on his extraordinary head of wavy hair. He was revered for his person and his exploits; he was the kind of man for whom a woman would—and did, at his side, while he slept, after being told their affair would end in the morning—kill herself. Mermoz was the more visible of the two, more the front man: as the Latécoère adage went, “Mermoz défriche, Guillaumet laboure” (“Mermoz clears, Guillaumet plows”). If Guillaumet has a place today in the crowded pantheon of French aviators it is in part thanks to Saint-Exupéry, who told his tales for him. Mermoz is remembered—and forgotten—on his own merits and demerits.* It happened, not accidentally since Daurat was involved, that most of Saint-Exupéry’s initiations in 1926 took place under the supervision of the masterful Guillaumet.

  After Guillaumet had twice carried Saint-Exupéry as a passenger on the Toulouse/Alicante run, Daurat entrusted the newcomer with his first mail. He delivered this news to him in his office one evening late in November or early in December, in a conversation that could not have much differed from the way Saint-Exupéry reported it in Wind, Sand and Stars:

  He said: “You leave tomorrow.” I stood motionless, waiting for him to dismiss me. After a moment of silence he added: “I take it you know the regulations?” In those days the motor was not what it is today. It would drop out, for example, without warning and with a great rattle like the crash of crockery. And one would simply throw in one’s hand: there was no hope of refuge on the rocky crust of Spain.… Still, the important thing was to avoid a collision with the range; and blind flying through a sea of clouds in the mountain zones was subject to the severest penalties. A pilot in trouble who buried himself in the white cotton-wool of the clouds might all unseeing run straight into a peak. This was why, that night, the deliberate voice repeated insistently its warning: “Navigating by the compass in a sea of clouds over Spain is all very well, it is very dashing, but—“ And I was struck by the graphic image: “But you want to remember that below the sea of clouds lies eternity.”

  Saint-Exupéry wrote that he left Daurat that evening with a sense of childish pride. He was by no means oblivious to the dangers that awaited him the next morning, however. Turbulence, fog, and snowstorms amid the Pyrenees represented significant obstacles to the pilot of an open-cockpit Breguet 14, which had an operational ceiling of 13,500 feet; in the mountains it is easier, and more dangerous, to get lost, and more difficult to manage an emergency landing. The Pyrenees, moreover, are no ordinary mountain range; from the point of view of the pilot of a small craft they are more formidable than the much taller Alps, harboring sudden, magnetic storms, extreme turbulence, and high cloud cover in all seasons. The previous year, Willy Coppens, the Belgian ace, had been advised by his pilot to brace himself as they overflew the Pyrenees; the pilot had lost his previous passenger. The same fate
had befallen Pierre Jaladieu, who preceded Saint-Exupéry at Juby. In the hope that Guillaumet might go over the route with him Saint-Exupéry sought him out that night at the Grand Balcon, where the news that he was to make his maiden flight had preceded him. Guillaumet asked how the debutant felt, and produced two glasses and a bottle of port. “It’s easier than you think,” promised the veteran, who in his shirtsleeves spread out Saint-Exupéry’s maps on the table before them.

  Saint-Exupéry was that night to receive the most unorthodox geography lesson of his life and the first he would enjoy. “Guillaumet did not teach Spain to me, he made the country my friend. He did not talk to me about provinces or people or livestock,” he remembered. Nor did the veteran pilot talk of wind sheer or radio navigation. The Latécoère maps were rudimentary Michelin or general survey maps; Saint-Exupéry reported that he had had to reprimand the countryside for its impertinent refusal to conform to the indications on his papers. At Daurat’s insistence, the pilots flew always below the clouds, following the natural landmarks across the border, even if this meant treehopping. Guillaumet introduced Saint-Exupéry to a different way to survey the earth. He talked about a row of tall orange trees, about a farmer and his wife who lived alone on a remote mountain slope and were like lighthouse keepers to the pilots, about a brook that meandered quietly through an emergency landing field and could turn up where it was least expected, about a herd of thirty sheep that could appear out of nowhere to tangle with a plane’s wheels. He taught Saint-Exupéry about the color of a river, from which a pilot could tell whether it was safe to land nearby or whether he would be putting down in swampland. This was Saint-Exupéry’s kind of geography, Guillaumet his kind of Virgil. “Little by little, under the lamp, the Spain of my map became a sort of fairyland,” he wrote later. The Aeneid, he would claim in a scene in Southern Mail based on this tutorial with Guillaumet, had failed to yield up a single secret capable of saving him from death. Guillaumet’s orange orchards, streams, and shepherdesses did. These wisdoms belonged to the secret language the Saint-Jean instructors had been unable to impart, a secret language not unlike that of the attics of Saint-Maurice. Saint-Exupéry liked his dose of the natural world flavored with a hint of mysticism, which this flying by vision and instinct—or “à l’oeil et à la fesse” (“by the seat of the pants”), as one mechanic more colorfully put it—surely provided. Like all French aristocrats he had an abiding attachment to the earth; like all early aviators he enjoyed as close a relationship with the ground as with the air.