by Stacy Schiff
As it turned out, that evening at the Grand Balcon was a pivotal one not only for Saint-Exupéry and for his friendship with Guillaumet, to whom the French edition of Wind, Sand and Stars would later be dedicated.
At Montaudran Daurat was said to be everywhere and to hear and see everything; he did not miss this těte-à-těte, which astonished him. His account may be more telling than Saint-Exupéry’s:
Late in the night, I saw Saint-Exupéry seated at Guillaumet’s side; they were concentrating on a map laid out in front of them. The silent Guillaumet was speaking, with increasing warmth; he was speaking of his kingdom, rich in scope, rich because of his unique discoveries.… the conversation intensified, bringing out in Guillaumet the soul of the poet-guide. He was discovering himself through his contact with Saint-Exupéry, and I knew instantly that a rare friendship had just been born.
In an interview in which he himself proved more forthcoming than usual, Daurat admitted that it was only at this moment, in the dim light of the Grand Balcon sitting room as he watched Guillaumet warm to Saint-Exupéry’s questions and the newcomer carefully mark up his map, that he felt certain he had not made a mistake in hiring Sudour’s ex-student.
~
When Saint-Exupéry left Guillaumet that winter evening he headed out for a brisk walk. The twelve hours that followed, beginning with this late-night promenade through a chilly city, became, at least in retrospect, emblematic, the keystone of his philosophy. In 1926 he was still more concerned with his own evolution than with that of man in general, but this changed as he came into his own, as he quite literally broadened his horizons. As he saw it—and Saint-Exupéry often enough telescoped events but rarely misrepresented them—those hours came to illustrate the power of work, of craft, of a mission, to lift man above himself. (He had indeed been reading Nietzsche—“I am immensely fond of this writer,” he admitted that fall—but this was something else altogether.) He strolled through the Toulousian streets, his collar turned up against the cold, drunk with that sweet mixture of pride and nervous fervor that any new lover knows. The people he passed in the street had no idea they were about to confide their most cherished hopes, their precious business interests to his care so that he might convey them across mountain ranges and boundaries; he was a shepherd, a warrior, a magician. “I alone was in the confidence of the stars,” he thought, savoring his newfound responsibility, the religious flavor of his appointment. Walking past lighted shop windows, he found himself in “a paradise of sweet things” and yet tasted only “the proud intoxication of renunciation.” He had no need for these earthly trinkets, he who was luxuriously “wrapped in the aura of friendship, dazed a little like a child on Christmas Eve, expectant of surprise and palpitatingly prepared for happiness.”
He awoke, at three, to rain. Thirty minutes later he was dressed and seated on his little suitcase, waiting on the wet pavement in front of the Grand Balcon for the tram,* which this morning was also enchanted. It carried in it his previous life; suddenly Saint-Exupéry came face-to-face with his near death by bureaucracy. He did not handle this encounter with a surfeit of charity. The streetcar was redolent of stale tobacco and of wet clothes; to Saint-Exupéry it “smelled of the dust of government offices into which the life of a man sinks as into a quicksand.” Every 500 yards or so it stopped to pick up a notary, a guard, a customs inspector, each of whom fell asleep immediately or quietly swapped tales of domestic woes with his neighbor as the tram groaned along. Saint-Exupéry reveled in his disguise: he was indistinguishable from these bureaucrats, yet hours later they would be locked in offices, victims of “their dreary diurnal tasks, their red tape, their monotonous lives” and he would be battling dragons in the sky. The streetcar became a sort of chrysalis—a favorite image for Saint-Exupéry the nature writer—from which a man might emerge transformed. And on this particular morning he felt “the birth within him of the sovereign”:
Old bureaucrat … you, like a termite, built your peace by blocking up with cement every chink and cranny through which the light might pierce. You rolled yourself up into a ball in your genteel security, in routine, in the stifling conventions of provincial life, raising a modest rampart against the winds and the tides and the stars. You have chosen not to be perturbed by great problems, having trouble enough to forget your own fate as man. You are not the dweller upon an errant planet and do not ask yourself questions to which there are no answers. You are a petty bourgeois of Toulouse. Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time.
He pitied but did not blame the “old bureaucrat,” who had never been allowed to escape. No one had been on hand to awaken the hidden musician, the poet, the astronomer, in his soul. There was, as Saint-Exupéry was always eager to point out, no gardener for men, no doctor of souls, no one willing, like the Little Prince, to protect, shelter, and cultivate his rose, no matter how uncooperative or undeserving that rose might be. He may not have spoken or written of having been orphaned at four—as was the authority-lover who had preceded him, Nietzsche, at five—but this loss had clearly left its mark.
If Saint-Exupéry’s analysis of his fellow commuters rings like an indictment it should be heard more as a loud sigh of relief. Any man could succumb to this fate, as the pilot well knew. If he seemed to recoil from these men it was with the terror of recognition; he flinched as a Henry V might from a Falstaff. He would not end either as a sedentary or as a gigolo, a broken man in a sedate line of work. Latécoère had grasped him by the shoulder while there was still time; Didier Daurat was his gardener. In a roundabout way he had stumbled upon one of the few true crusades the twentieth century had to offer. His natural modesty did not blind him to this parallel. Daurat’s copy of Wind, Sand and Stars came inscribed to a man who had alone built “a sort of separate civilization in which men felt more noble than elsewhere.” He was grateful, not immodest. He saw that he could put to use the name which, in the words of another pilot, sounded so much like that of “a knight of the Holy Grail.” Responsibility may well be another name for aristocracy; Saint-Exupéry had discovered a last bastion of noblesse oblige. The irony was that Daurat never tired of reminding his pilots, for the sake of their work, that they were mere day laborers: “Don’t forget that imagination, heroism do not belong here. You are workmen.”
As much as he was a man of the people, despite his condemnation of the Parisian drawing rooms, despite his thoroughgoing respect for Guillaumet and his dedication to the Latécoère team, there was, in fact, a decidedly undemocratic ring to Saint-Exupéry’s humanitarian vision. On the one hand he claimed to admire above all else the steady-working gardener, the devoted mother of five. On the other he loathed all that reeked of the subjugation of the individual to his task. His very belief in a cosmic gardener on earth was elitist. It was an idea he would probe most deeply in his last book, a quasi-religious text in which he makes a quiet case for oligarchy. He knew it was the universal that bound men together but he never stopped despairing of the baseness of that standard, could not understand why it was Pirandello instead of Ibsen, jazz instead of Mozart, a cheap print instead of a van Gogh or a Cézanne that won out. He loved the life of the barracks but generally lived apart; in Toulouse he decamped soon enough from the Grand Balcon to a nearby apartment on the rue d’Alsace-Lorraine, although this was not as uncommon among the Latécoère staff as it had been in Strasbourg. He relished his separateness the way another man might have relished his particule.
To a friend he wrote from a Toulouse café not long after his first flight. Seated at a table to which he had for several evenings laid claim, he surveyed a room of mute card players. They silently downed their apéritifs; he ruminated in his corner. He compared their incomparable silences. These men were considering their next hand; he was dreaming of Moors and planes. “The proprietor and the waiter already take me for their prisoner; they pull out my chair for me, smile benevolently over the three sugars I dissolve in my coffee, beam radiantly as I order a beer afterward, fail to contain th
eir joy when at 10:00 o’clock sharp I send for cigarettes, reminding me, ‘It’s time for Monsieur’s cigarettes.’ They think me theirs for the next twenty years. How I am going to disappoint them!” To Renée de Saussine he described the “little provincial path” he traced daily. He would play perfectly at his routine until—overwhelmed by the desire to escape and explore new territory—he would emigrate to a new chair in a new café and a new newspaper vendor, for whom he would coin a new, formulaic greeting. Elsewhere he admitted to a terrific fear of habit, a diet of which gave rise to “mushrooms.” If he threw himself humbly, wholeheartedly into the métier, he did not bow to consistency. He had always seemed congenitally, unapologetically incapable of it; now he began to write it off as little-mindedness. There were plenty of reasons why some Latécoère personnel should think Daurat kept Saint-Exupéry on purely because of his name, which he did not.
Saint-Exupéry’s affair with the transcendent got off to a soggy start. At the airfield on the morning of his first Alicante run the rain continued to fall. The wind whipped up waves in the puddles. “Would you call this bad weather?” he asked Daurat, who looked out the window as if doing so for the first time and mumbled: “It doesn’t mean anything.” Saint-Exupéry was left to wonder what might constitute bad weather. He felt emptied, suddenly, of all of the confidence Guillaumet had instilled in him. One line returned to haunt him: Guillaumet had said that he pitied the man who did not know the whole line, pebble by pebble, especially if that man were to run into a snowstorm.
He took off in the rain. Five hours later, after a stopover in Barcelona, he landed in Alicante, the warmest town in Europe, the only one, he wrote giddily later, “where dates ripen.” He saw no snow, save for that safely blanketing the Pyrenees. His return flight the next day was slightly more eventful. He again cleared the mountains without difficulty but met with a heavy fog—and an early evening—between Carcassonne and Toulouse. Several miles short of Montaudran he was forced down in a field. A search committee set out immediately by car and after a number of hours finally located him. Raymond Vanier, Daurat’s second-in-command, found the pilot seated under a wing of his plane in the wet grass. “Monsieur,” said Saint-Exupéry, “the plane is intact. I apologize for not having fully completed my first mail flight; I did my best.” It was a far cry from the Bossuet ballad of the lost desk.
* It is said that when the Banque de France, anticipating a series of banknotes that would celebrate French technology, polled French schoolchildren for the name of the country’s foremost aviator, the answer came back resoundingly, “Mermoz.” A man can endear himself to history and offend her, too: in the 1930s, Mermoz joined the avowedly fascist Croix-de-Feu organization, an affiliation that did not make him banknote material in the eyes of a Socialist administration. Saint-Exupéry profited from his colleague’s disfavor and in 1993 appeared in Mermoz’s place on the fifty-franc bill.
* Saint-Exupéry’s “omnibus” or tram, mistakenly turned into a bus in the English-language version of Terre des hommes.
VIII
~
The Swift Completion of Their Appointed Rounds
1927–1929
Orders are orders.
SAINT-EXUPÉRY, The Little Prince
Saint-Exupéry’s mishap was an insignificant one in the early annals of Latécoère, as rich in bravura as in misadventure. The two were often one and the same; at other times the early days resembled nothing more than a pilot’s version of a Keystone comedy. At the end of the war France was left not only with one of the most productive aeronautics industries in the world, but also with 12,000 aviators and very nearly as many planes. These facts did not escape the notice of Pierre-Georges Latécoère, an ambitious young industrialist who, upon completing engineering school, had returned to the family timber business, and was perennially on the lookout for a venture he could call his own. Initially he had turned to the construction of railway cars, with which he had much success. But by 1917 it was clear to the thirty-four-year-old, whose poor eyesight had kept him from the front, that the railroad was a creature of the nineteenth century. That October, at a time when it was estimated that no fewer than three months were needed to produce the first aircraft in a new series in an efficient, existing factory (of which he had none), he entered into a government contract to manufacture 1,000 Salmson reconnaissance planes within the year. He was late with his first delivery of 600 planes, but only slightly so, and he made a fortune, having by the terms of his agreement profited as much from the Armistice as from the war. Even before the peace Latécoère began to think about the airplane’s potential in the post-war world; he needed a new challenge, and he did not by nature think small.
In May 1918 Latécoère shared his vision with Beppo de Massimi, a childhood friend whose wartime flying experience Latécoère—who would never himself pilot an airplane—prized. He did not consider a simple Paris/London or Paris/Amsterdam line; these were cities that were already well-connected by train. Nor did he begin to dream of passenger aviation, a business for which open-cockpit Breguets and Salmsons seemed ill-suited. Instead he turned toward what lay south of France and toward the Americas, and thought in terms of the far-flung business interests of the early-twentieth-century empires. At this time France was, after Britain, the second largest colonial power in the world; her holdings in Africa alone totaled nearly 4 million square miles, well over fifteen times the size of continental France herself. French trade with Morocco, one of the jewels in her colonial crown, had tripled in the four prewar years. The war had driven home—as the next one would even more forcefully—the strategic and economic importance of these possessions. Latécoère imagined a network that would link Rabat and Casablanca to France via stops along the Spanish coast, a line which would later extend to the south through the Río de Oro and along the Mauritanian coast to Saint-Louis-du-Sénégal and Dakar, the administrative seat of the French West African empire. Dakar was a bustling, inclement city of 40,000 people; its French population was small, but it was France’s third largest port. With the advent of air travel it suddenly became one of the world’s best-located cities as well; the 1,620 nautical miles that separated it from the New World shrank overnight. When the technology caught up with his vision—Latécoère had conceived of this network with 400-mile-hopping converted warplanes in mind—Latécoère thought that Dakar’s Cape Verde peninsula, the westernmost point in Africa, could serve as a jumping-off point for the Americas. The airline might then continue toward Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, and Montevideo, ultimately on toward North America.
The windmill-tilting for which Pierre-Georges Latécoère would be best remembered began when he presented his fantastic scheme to Massimi that May. The underlying argument, according to the Italian, seemed to be: “I’ve reworked all the numbers. They confirm the opinion of the specialists: It cannot be done. We have only one option: To go ahead and do it.” Before the Armistice had been signed Latécoère had presented his bold proposal for a commercial airline to the government; he felt he could reduce the distance between Toulouse and Casablanca to two days at most (by rail and boat from Paris a letter to Casablanca at this time took seven to eleven days, depending on the season), between Toulouse and Dakar to five days in lieu of twelve to fourteen. Before the government’s position was made clear, Massimi—who reveled in the art of diplomacy and was to practice more of it than he might have counted on for Latécoère—had been dispatched to Spain to negotiate an authorization for overflying Spanish territory and building and equipping coastline airstrips.
Latécoère celebrated Christmas 1918 in a Salmson over the Pyrenees. He and his pilot executed the maiden Toulouse/Barcelona flight, a trip of 200 miles. Two months later Massimi was flown from Toulouse to Alicante, 250 miles south of Barcelona, where he had arranged for a 600-meter landing strip to be cleared. Unfortunately his request had been understood to mean 600 square meters; some time before or after the plane crashed and Massimi’s nose began to gush blood the Italian accurately not
ed, “It’s a handkerchief, not a landing strip!” He and his pilot immediately set out to clear a suitable runway, as Latécoère was himself en route. Happily for the grooming committee, Latécoère’s arrival was delayed. His pilot had lost his glasses to turbulence in the Pyrenees and had gone on to overfly Barcelona, where he should have stopped to refuel, without seeing the city. With an empty tank he landed on a strip of sand about one-third of the way between Barcelona and Alicante. Here he and Latécoère managed to refuel, and the two continued on their way. With his passenger’s help the pilot was able to make out the airstrip at Alicante but not the windsock, which indicated that he was landing with a tremendous tailwind. The airplane raced down the length of the newly extended runway to crash against the rocks at its end. After being helped from the wreckage, the incorrigible Latécoère concluded, “That didn’t go so badly. We’ll have to repair these planes. In a month we’ll go all the way to Morocco.” All the same, he chose to return to France that evening by train.
