by Stacy Schiff
Less than a month later, at a time when Saint-Exupéry’s sights were still fixed on his naval exams, Latécoère indeed stepped out of a Salmson to a triumphant welcome in Rabat. Maréchal Lyautey—not yet named a maréchal, but as résident général acknowledged to be the uncrowned king of Morocco—was on hand to congratulate the industrialist. Latécoère presented Lyautey with a copy of the previous day’s Paris newspaper; he bestowed on his wife a bouquet of violets that had traveled from Toulouse in a hatbox. He had made the trip from France in fewer than twenty-four hours, or in a quarter of the time it took a boat traveling under the most favorable conditions. It was the fastest Lyautey had ever received his newspaper; its delivery won Latécoère an important ally. Lyautey had his own budget, from which he immediately offered the industrialist an important subsidy. Effectively guaranteed a monopoly on the France-bound mail, Latécoère had a contract in hand for the southern mail by the end of the summer. Several pilots were recruited; Massimi called on his squadron leader, Daurat, who arrived in Toulouse in August. La Ligne was off and running, if a little erratically.
On September 1, 1919, Daurat inaugurated service between Toulouse and Casablanca. The equipment remained so unreliable—and Latécoère’s determination so strong—that seven planes were lined up for the trip although only three were to make the flight. The enterprise suffered its first casualty that December, when a pilot went down near the Pyrenees. A host of accidents followed. There were all kinds of problems—of morale, diplomacy, matériel, security, finances. The headaches seemed disproportionate to the task at hand, which was simply to take off and land on schedule. The Spanish proved as unpredictable and adversarial as the winds over the Pyrenees: that autumn both Daurat and another pilot, making separate emergency landings on Spanish soil, were taken prisoner by the Spanish, who claimed not to have been informed that the French had been authorized to land on their territory. Anti-French sentiment ran high in Spain, where neither the Court nor the military smiled upon her neighbor; the Germans had generously lent a hand in the supply and development of the country’s infant airlines and continued to lobby effectively in Madrid. Overflying Spain could be legal for Latécoère one day and illegal the next. As late as 1928, the French ambassador to Spain was writing the Quai d’Orsay of the passive resistance the Spanish were demonstrating toward the airline: “We have a fair amount of proof that the standing orders have been not to favor, and even to hinder, the operations of the France-Morocco line; we often find that promises extracted from recently installed ministers are suddenly withdrawn.” In 1937 the London Times reported that Saint-Exupéry had flown to Timbuktu to investigate an alternate France—South America route because the French and Spanish continued to squabble.
Still, through a series of mishaps and miracles, the Latécoère enterprise forged ahead. In 1920, one year after Daurat’s flight to Casablanca, the company consisted of thirteen pilots, thirty mechanics, and sixty airplanes, or one-third of the entire French commercial fleet and one-fifth of its active commercial pilots. And Latécoère continued to expand: in 1923 the Casablanca—Dakar route was prospected, although not without difficulties of its own. Two years later, when that route—an empty boulevard of desert—was officially opened, it was as true as ever that la Ligne amounted to “a series of forays based on luck and the grit of the men who fly them.” This did not prevent Latécoère from boarding a boat to Rio—almost exactly one month to the day after Saint-Exupéry first appeared before Daurat—to see if he might tilt at some windmills in South America. Less than two years later, a letter posted from Paris arrived in eight days in Buenos Aires, in a quarter of the time the same envelope would have taken when Latécoère made his 1926 trip.
In 1920 Latécoère transported 200,000 letters. Ten years later—when service had been extended to Africa and South America—the airline would carry 32 million. The quality of its service and that of its equipment remained hugely divergent. In 1927 the pilots complained that they spent half their time bailing out their broken-down colleagues, that they could count on a malfunction every third trip, that the planes stumbled along at low altitudes without the power to climb, that they took off only on whim. And yet of the 1,462 bags of mail carried that year only one—at least according to the company’s annual report—failed to reach its destination. In the short term at any rate the Latécoère story was one of stunning success. By 1930 it had grown into the longest line in the world and represented the largest of Europe’s commercial fleets. Latécoère’s personal sense of invincibility had penetrated the ranks; the airline boasted an esprit de corps that no other could rival and that it could claim as its greatest asset.
With its mail lines, France capitalized on the breadth of its empire, its prewar achievements in aviation, and its wartime industry. It was also true that French soil proved naturally hospitable to the Latécoère vision in the first place. While his countrymen may not have entirely understood the premium Latécoère placed on speed, they appreciated as well as anyone his devotion to the written word, sacred in France. The French love their mail, so much so that they long resisted the telephone, which is invasive, and which overrides the laws of social intercourse, and for which even today one has to make excuses in good company. (Saint-Exupéry had few such reservations about the telephone, which he abused. The written word never traveled fast enough for his tastes, and even when his own missives did he felt compelled to call to explicate or correct his texts. He chastised Renée de Saussine for having sent a letter by boat in 1930: “It’s hardly worth our knocking ourselves out to move the mail if our letters come to us by boat.”) Today Parisians enjoy three mail deliveries a day, and a letter sent from any point in France to any other reliably arrives overnight.
The reasons why Latécoère thrived in the 1920s were not primarily cultural or colonial, however. No government did more to encourage the aviation industry after the war than the French. The British and the Americans were by comparison apathetic; the Germans were hamstrung by the terms of the peace. The French set up a National Weather Bureau. The Comité Francais de Propagande Aéronautique—a sort of educational public relations committee—was established by the industrialist André Michelin in 1921; its mission was to instill “l’esprit aviateur” in every Frenchman. The state helped to train pilots, to develop aircraft. Flying clubs were established all over the country. Subsidies were available—Saint-Exupéry may have benefited from one in 1935—for those interested in purchasing an airplane for personal use; at least 40 percent of the price was underwritten by the state. The French were further motivated by their anti-German spirit, which piqued their well-developed appetite for public competition, of which this one was among the more glorious. The Quai d’Orsay had its own interest in tying the French empire closely together: the more speedily the colonies could communicate with the Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, the more the colonial governors were forced to defer to Parisian-based decision-making. Aviation in fact helped to put an end to the age of the diplomat-adventurer, the gentilhomme de fortune. By the mid-1950s—when pilots had begun to complain as well that the age of “la belle aventure” had skidded to an end—colonialization had become the domain of the civil servant. The government was generous with Latécoère, who routinely performed a sort of Columbus-before-Queen-Isabella dance before its ministers, and their investment paid off handsomely in prestige and historical firsts.
By the early 1930s, when that government began to prove a fickle benefactor, when the Latécoère-founded enterprise had begun to creak on its uneasy economic foundations, most countries flew their mail from city to city. Germany and Holland were, and had been, well in advance of the rest of the world in building transport machines. The U.S. mail had made its way from New York to San Francisco in forty-eight hours as early as mid-1927. Lindbergh’s flight of that year transformed America’s laggard attitude toward aviation. France herself had four other mail lines, and Latécoère had a new name, having been sold to Marcel Bouilloux-Lafont, a South American–b
ased Frenchman, after whose entrance on the scene in 1927 the company was known colloquially as Aéropostale. (Its official name was the Compagnie Générale Aéropostale.) Pierre-Georges Latécoère’s brainstorm was an impressive but short chapter in the frenetic and crowded history of early aviation; it was not the longest-lived airline but it was arguably the most ambitious. In some ways it was simply a compelling commercial for the insignificance of distance, for the potential of technology. If it was remembered for far more even after the noisy scandals that brought it down were forgotten, that was largely thanks to a misfit of a pilot who wrote indelibly of its heroic age although he was not himself one of its heroes and never claimed that he was. He never figured in the company’s annual report, but was to do for la Ligne what Life would do for the Mercury 7 astronauts. History belongs to the eloquent.
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No one described flying over fogged-in mountain peaks, battling down-drafts, navigating in snowstorms better than Saint-Exupéry. He flew through the Pyrenees regularly in December 1926 and January 1927, during which time he grew more and more accustomed to the discipline of the métier and the indiscipline of the machines. He wrote Renée de Saussine of the mountain gods that guarded the French-Spanish border:
You apply for the right to pass. At 9,000 feet, you feel very proud. But the hostile gods drag you down and the altimeter plummets “9,000 … 7,000 … 5,000 … 4,500 … 3,000” as do you along with it; you’re forced to turn around because the mountain is now higher than you are and the gods are laughing. And you try to escape through a valley, with the confidence of an omelette in a frying pan, because the hostile gods are playing tennis, and you are the ball.
After another trip he reported that he piloted with one hand and held on for his life with the other; on occasion he held on for his life with both, while his airplane “took the opportunity to dance a little Charleston.” At 100 miles per hour he made his way in a snowstorm through two walls of mountain he could not see. He had only his compass to guide him; it got him out of the snowstorm but took him entirely off course. This was the flight that caused him to remark on the unfortunate similarity between a compass and a weathervane. On another occasion he reported that it had taken him nine hours to make the trip from Toulouse to Alicante, normally a five- or six-hour flight. He was exhausted after these excursions, which in early 1927 began to extend to Casablanca and occasionally on to Tangier. He might fly as much as 2,500 miles in four days. If he stood after such a trip he claimed he looked drunk; if he talked he stuttered; he was never quite sure where he was. The only time the word “heroic” entered his mind was when, after such an ordeal, he made the superhuman effort to sit down and write a letter before keeling over with fatigue.
By mid-January he was considered a seasoned enough pilot to graduate to the Casablanca–Dakar line, now a little over eighteen months old. Understandably, he was a little uneasy, particularly on account of the Moors, who only a month after his arrival at Latécoère had murdered two of his colleagues. Probably it did not help much that he was told to be ready to leave for Dakar several weeks before he was actually sent on his way; fear, he was to say later, was a result of having nothing to do. He packed his bags and lived, unhappily, in what may well have been the tidiest room he ever occupied, until early February. Since moving to the apartment on the rue d’Alsace-Lorraine he had waged war against his landlady’s porcelain figurines, which he routinely hid in the closet only to find miraculously resurrected on the mantelpiece on his return. Now he allowed these two statuettes, a hunchbacked Zouave and a shepherdess, trappings of a life he so much resisted, to win; he let them reign over his desolate room full of boxes. Claiming the order enforced by these kitsch gods to be painful, he spent as little time as possible in his quarters. He felt like a fifteen-year-old about to head off to boarding school, with all of his memories neatly tucked away for the trip. Sometime in January, probably before the bags were packed, Madame de Saint-Exupéry paid her son a visit in Toulouse, as she had been hoping to do for some time. He was moody and sullen. He claimed this was because he had felt unable to cheer his mother, who was not feeling up to par. Just before he left he wrote contritely that he would return to France solvent, a marriageable man, the son of her dreams.
On February 6 Saint-Exupéry flew an empty aircraft to Agadir, midway between Casablanca and Cape Juby. From here he was to continue on to Dakar as a passenger. On the seventh Guillaumet and an interpreter took off from Agadir in one Breguet with the mail; René Riguelle took off with Saint-Exupéry in another. There was a moment of drama when the two planes lost each other after Villa Cisneros, but they landed in tandem at Port-Étienne, refueled, and quickly headed off on the next and longest lap, the penultimate one. Despite his excitement Saint-Exupéry succumbed to the heat and drifted off to sleep, waking momentarily to note that Riguelle had moved the Breguet a mile or so out to sea in an effort to find cooler air. He was not particularly happy about this decision—were anything to go wrong they would surely drown, he thought—but dozed off again nonetheless.
I was startled out of my sleep by a crash, a sudden silence, and then the voice of Riguelle saying, “Damn! There goes a connecting rod!” As I half rose out of my seat to send a regretful look at that white coastline, now more precious than ever, he shouted to me angrily to stay as I was. I knew Riguelle had been wrong to go out to sea; I had been on the point of mentioning it; and now I felt a complete and savage satisfaction in our predicament. “This,” I said to myself, “will teach him a lesson.”
But this gratifying sense of superiority could obviously not last very long. Riguelle sent the plane earthward in a long diagonal line that brought us within sixty feet of the sand—an altitude at which there was no question of picking out a landing place. We lost both wheels against one sand dune, a wing against another, and crashed with a sudden jerk into a third.
“You hurt?” Riguelle called out.
“Not a bit,” I said.
“That’s what I call piloting a ship!” he boasted cheerfully.
The airplane had ploughed into the dunes at seventy miles per hour; it was, Saint-Exupéry reported to Ségogne, one of the many people he wrote of his memorable Saharan initiation, “a handsome crash.” Saint-Exupéry crawled on all fours from the wreckage; he was indeed unhurt, but ached all over. He reckoned the two were hundreds of miles from help of any kind, with two revolvers, three tins of food, and no water save that in the Breguet’s radiator. (Mermoz had discovered the pernicious effects of this beverage the previous year when, stranded near Juby, he had on his third day been reduced to drinking his radiator water. He suffered less from having been captured by the Moors on this exploit than from the damage the acidic fluid had done to his intestines.) Riguelle assured Saint-Exupéry that Guillaumet would be along to rescue them; sure enough Guillaumet touched down shortly, on the flat stretch of nearby sand to which Riguelle had been headed. There was not room in his Breguet for all of them, however, and it was decided that Saint-Exupéry would stay behind while Guillaumet and Riguelle flew the mail on to safety, after which they would return for him.
On his first day in the Sahara Saint-Exupéry was left in the middle of a vast sea of rolling dunes, armed, with the instructions to shoot at anything he saw. Riguelle and Guillaumet handed over to him their extra ammunition, which led him to expect the worst, but what he remembered having felt was something else altogether. He was alone—in his first account of the afternoon he referred to it as his “baptěme de solitude“—and he could sense the mystery of the desert, the hum of its silence. It had the rich appeal of an old house. He was very far from Paris, or even Toulouse. “Sitting on the dune, I laid out beside me my gun and my five cartridge clips. For the first time since I was born it seemed to me that my life was my own and that I was responsible for it.” He climbed a dune and surveyed the horizon like a captain from his ship, enchanted by the empty sea around him. A gazelle turned up, as did, toward the end of the golden-tinted afternoon, Guillaumet. “You weren�
��t frightened?” asked the veteran, who had neglected to mention that he had abandoned his colleague in one of the safest stretches of the Sahara, well within the boundaries of Mauritania. “I said no, and thought, Gazelles are not frightening,” remembered Saint-Exupéry. To his mother he wrote nonchalantly of the initiation: “The trip went well, aside from a breakdown and the plane crashing in the desert.”
He was not so matter-of-fact concerning his accommodations that evening. Only his description of the evening of February 8 has survived, but it has in so many versions that it is fairly easy to gauge its accuracy. Together, too, these variations on a theme reveal a good deal about the narrative and spiritual drama Saint-Exupéry could extract from a single image-heavy event. Riguelle had been lucky to crash not far from the French fort at Nouakchott, on the Mauritanian coast, the site today of that country’s capital. A single French sergeant had manned the outpost for several years with his fifteen Senegalese soldiers; nothing was more welcome to this misplaced bit of France than the arrival of three compatriots, who were to him like gifts from heaven. He had not seen a Frenchman in six months; the original victim of poor communications, the sergeant received his mail twice a year, at which point the responses to his letters no longer made much sense. His luxury in life consisted of a supply of candles, by which he kept up his off-kilter correspondence from his spartan bedroom. In one account Saint-Exupéry has the sergeant weeping at the sight of his visitors. By all accounts he began to pour out his heart—and his provisions—for these emissaries from the homeland. Proudly he treated the aviators to the best of his cellar, after which the group filed up to the parapet of the fort and discussed the stars. (They were, Saint-Exupéry noted, “all present, all accounted for.”) The four men smoked, they surveyed the heavens, they traded intimate confidences in the moonlight. Guillaumet and Riguelle reminisced about women they knew in France, whose charms they celebrated; so as not to be outdone Saint-Exupéry invented a girlfriend for the occasion. The sergeant talked about his lieutenant and his captain, whom he had not seen in months and who were, twice a year, his only visitors. Saint-Exupéry realized that for a man marooned in the desert these were no less memories of love.
