by Stacy Schiff
The Argentines are crazy about him.… The mail goes through despite the winds, and—despite his absentminded demeanor—our friend manages the Aeroposta Argentina with a firm hand. He flies all day, delivers the mails, lands suddenly 600 miles from Buenos Aires on an airfield whose chief—thinking himself far outside anyone’s purview—is tending to his bridge game and not to his field. Saint-Exupéry rights the situation, takes off again, returns to Pacheco as night falls, picks up his car, races home at full speed, and spends the rest of the night writing. I wonder when he sleeps, this phenomenon!
At about the same time accolades arrived from another quarter. For his service at Juby Saint-Exupéry was nominated for the Légion d’Honneur in March. The honor was accorded him a year later, in acknowledgment of his having “demonstrated a remarkable sangfroid and a rare sense of self-sacrifice” in the desert. His sponsor had been Abbé Sudour, to whom he already owed so much.
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Nineteen-thirty proved something of a banner year for Aéropostale in South America. The Patagonia route was soon to be, under Saint-Exupéry’s supervision, up and running; the mail went regularly from Buenos Aires east to Rio de Janeiro and north to Asunción; day and night the planes flew up and down the coast, from Natal south. On the Pacific side of the continent, Bolivia and Chile were linked; Vachet set up an operation in Venezuela. The Latécoère 28, a luxuriously robust machine with a 600-horsepower motor, an outside range of 700 miles, and a cruising speed of 150 miles per hour, had begun to arrive in numbers. Once a pilot flew in the closed cabin of the Laté 28—a feature necessary at this speed—he was likely to turn his nose up at the Laté 25 and 26, which were slowly retired. (This may have come as particularly welcome news to Saint-Exupéry. The Latécoère 25 had been designed to the measure of its test pilot, Elisée Negrin, who was very short. The long-legged Saint-Exupéry evidently had to engage in a series of acrobatics to get into the machine.) There had been a miraculous shortage of serious accidents, even while fatalities continued to plague the Toulouse—Dakar route. The fame of Mermoz, who had been seen off to France on January 20 by Saint-Exupéry, Guillaumet, Reine, and a crowd of thousands, had grown to the point where all of his colleagues basked in it. On the street, in theaters, in restaurants, people jostled for better views of “los aviadores franceses,” about whom they whispered breathlessly.
Late in March 1930 the Buenos Aires—Río Gallegos route was at last ready to be opened in both directions to regular service. Two aircraft made the inaugural voyage, a Laté 25 flown by Luro Cambaceres, who had prospected the route’s southernmost points, and a Laté 28, piloted by Negrin, then inspector general of the South American network. Marcel Bouilloux-Lafont made the trip in Negrin’s plane, as did Captain Vicente Almandos Almonacid, now the company’s technical director; Julien Pranville, Daurat’s highest-placed representative in South America; Alexandre Collenot, Mermoz’s ace mechanic; Saint-Exupéry; and an Argentine journalist. Saint-Exupéry flew the Laté 28 on the return trip, during the course of which he landed badly, wedging one of the airplane’s wheels in a ditch at Comodoro Rivadavia in such a way that the machine—which was brand new, having arrived from Paris the week before—nosed over on hitting the ground and was badly damaged. His sloppiness won him a stern and public rebuke from the company’s owner, which he did not forget; he never managed to warm up to Bouilloux-Lafont afterward. Paul Dony remembered Saint-Exupéry as having been so ashamed after the incident that he refused to show his face in Buenos Aires for ten days. He spent as much time as he could in the air, flying the mail, and slept in the Pacheco canteen.
A little over a month later, Mermoz flew into the Natal harbor from Saint-Louis, Senegal, in a specially equipped Laté 28, the first air arrival from Europe. Carrying 280 pounds of mail, he made the trip in a little more than nineteen hours, a feat that the French felt confirmed their supremacy in the air. (This despite the fact that a regular commercial link between the two continents was still some years off and despite the difficulty Mermoz had with the 1930 return: he took off on his fifty-third attempt and then watched the seaplane sink some 450 miles shy of the African coast.) The delirium created by Mermoz’s return to South America was tempered only by an accident that had occurred two days earlier. A Laté 28 bound for Natal to greet Mermoz had met with fog and crashed off the coast of Montevideo, leaving Negrin, Pranville, and three others to drown in the chilly waters. Only an Argentine journalist had managed to make it to shore; he had been thrown an inflatable cushion because he was the only man aboard who could not swim. The mail was retrieved off the Uruguayan coast and matter-of-factly marked: AIRCRAFT ACCIDENT MAIL RECOVERED IN OCEAN NO POSTAGE REQUIRED (Saint-Exupéry received the news badly in the small Argentine town in which he had stopped for repairs but did not attend the funeral). The day after his arrival Mermoz flew down to Buenos Aires for a five-day stay, partly to dispel the cloud cast by the Negrin incident. If he had not already met up with Saint-Exupéry in Natal he surely did so now.
France’s eminence in the air was further confirmed in September 1930 when Dieudonné Costes and Maurice Bellonte triumphed over the North Atlantic in a Breguet 19,* completing the first Paris—New York flight in just over thirty-seven hours, earning a tickertape parade down Broadway, a week’s worth of headlines, and a visit with President Hoover, and setting off the first transatlantic broadcast of the “Marseillaise.” The hero’s welcome Saint-Exupéry had described receiving in Patagonia was extended to Costes and Bellonte all over America, where the two pilots made an extended goodwill tour. Their success had some happy side effects in some unexpected places. The French ambassadorial staff, overwhelmed by the Francophilia occasioned by the pilots’ arrival in America, wired the Quai d’Orsay for permission to contribute publicly to the Franco-American lovefest. In October, Charles Lindbergh was named a commander of the Légion d’Honneur.
For Saint-Exupéry, nothing better typified this golden age of heroics than a misadventure. In the middle of the winter, a month after Mermoz’s crossing of the South Atlantic, Guillaumet took off from Santiago for Buenos Aires in a Potez 25. He had been flying the east-west route for a year; this was to be his ninety-second crossing of the Andes, no small feat given that the summits of the mountains—which look from the air like a prolongation of the Rockies—reach heights of more than 18,000 feet and the ceiling of a Potez was significantly lower. A pilot threaded his way through the passes on his wits and a clever manipulation of updrafts. The date was Friday, June 13. The weather was not good—in forty-eight hours fifteen feet of snow had fallen in the Andes—but undaunted, having already delayed the flight by a day, Guillaumet set out, convinced that he could avert the storm by making a detour to the south. At 17,000 feet he was caught in a fierce gale that dropped him 10,000 feet in what felt like an instant: he held not to the controls but to his seat. Underneath him as he pitched and rolled he caught sight of a dark spot that he recognized to be a lake. Descending toward Laguna Diamante seemed his only escape from the winds; the lake was surrounded by mountains, and he had been told its shores were flat and firm. Guillaumet descended to about 150 feet and flew round and round the lake until he ran out of fuel, at about 11:30, three and a half hours after having set out from Santiago. The plane was immediately swept over on landing, its propeller and its ailerons mangled; Guillaumet was knocked over—again and again—on standing. The ground was frozen and he was cold, but shoveling with a piece of the capsized plane’s fuselage he managed to dig a hole in the snow under the wings, in which, the wind howling over him, he stuffed himself and sat out the next forty-eight hours. “I leave to my readers the task of imagining what those first few days were like,” the laconic Guillaumet wrote later in his preface to the report to the company. In fact, he left the tale of his ordeal to Saint-Exupéry, who made of it probably the best-known passage of Wind, Sand and Stars.
During the course of the second night Guillaumet opened his eyes and saw a star in the sky. The winds had calmed; on the third day he emerged from hi
s shelter. He had already unloaded the mail bags from the Potez and placed them on a parachute, weighing the baggage down with rocks. On the two sides of the fuselage he scrawled in flint: “My last thought to my wife, with a kiss. I was forced to land here because of the storm. Not having been spotted from the air, I am heading east. Farewell to all.” In his suitcase he placed his reserves: a half bottle of rum, a tin of pâté, one of corned beef, two of sardines, two boxes of condensed milk, a few crackers. He was at an altitude of 10,500 feet, forty miles from Argentina as a bird flies and not counting the chain of frozen mountains that stood in the way. He knew that from the air he was invisible, having already been overflown several times, and that, not knowing what route he had taken, no one would have known where in the Andes to search for him. At ten o’clock on Sunday morning he set out, on foot. For the next five days and four nights he walked, his hands and feet frozen, swelling, and bleeding, exhausted beyond reason, covered in ice, aware that at these temperatures to sleep was to die. He saw puma tracks, and a number of guanacos; he stumbled and slid and crawled and walked on. The most difficult thing, he told Saint-Exupéry later, was to keep his mind off the snow. The easiest thing was to contemplate a silent, cold defeat. What saved him was less strength or ingenuity than love and pride: “My wife, if she believes I am alive, believes I am walking. My friends believe I am walking. They all have confidence in me. So I am a salaud if I don’t walk,” Saint-Exupéry quoted him as having reasoned. Facedown on a snow-covered slope he was roused to his feet by the demonic tug of bureaucracy. A line of fine print appeared before his eyes: without a corpse, the insurance company was not obligated to pay his wife any benefits for four years. He was indeed un salaud if he failed to go on; if he did not his wife would be penniless. At the top of the peak Guillaumet saw a slab of stone on which he could die and be sure the evidence would be found. With great pain, he climbed to the rock. And once there, he thought, why not continue? “What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step. It is always the same step, but you have to take it,” was the way Saint-Exupéry remembered Guillaumet having explained his superhuman endurance.
Jean-René Lefèbvre, then chief of the airfield in Mendoza, the temperate Argentine town in the eastern foothills of the Andes, had been waiting for Guillaumet to land since the morning of the thirteenth. That afternoon he alerted Saint-Exupéry in Buenos Aires and Pierre Deley, the Santiago chief, to Guillaumet’s disappearance. Both men flew to Mendoza and spent the next five days overflying the Andes in search of the Potez, a tiny, white needle in a vast, white haystack. Later Guillaumet told Saint-Exupéry he had seen him; he had known it was Saint-Exupéry because no reasonable pilot would have ventured so low among the mountains. On Friday, the twentieth, as Lefèbvre steeled himself to tell Madame Guillaumet she had been widowed, a call came from the police in San Carlos, seventy-five miles to the south, to say that Guillaumet had been found. Once again the documentary details fall to the Mendoza chief, who in his years with the company seemed always to be on hand in moments of high drama. Evidently he raced from the airfield to the Plaza Hotel, where Saint-Exupéry was lunching, to share the news. As Lefèbvre remembered it, the jubilant Saint-Exupéry rose from his table to shout, throughout the hotel, in French, “Guillaumet is saved!” Saint-Exupéry reported only that everyone in the dining room embraced. (In any event, word traveled around town in minutes, recalled Lefèbvre, like powder in the wind.) Instantly Saint-Exupéry was aloft in a Potez 29 with Lefèbvre and a second Mendoza mechanic, headed south toward San Carlos. As he had taken off without having had time to locate a map of the region, he was obliged to follow the southbound trail, flying at an altitude of about fifty feet. A good hour into the trip, the three saw a procession of horses and autos that could only have been that of Guillaumet’s saviors. The gauchos signaled to the aircraft, waving their ponchos wildly. Saint-Exupéry’s enthusiasm could not be contained. Lefèbvre reported that the pilot barely cleared a row of poplars to land in a meadow, coming to a stop inches from a ditch that had been invisible from the air. The mechanic, who knew of what he spoke, deemed it “without a doubt one of the most spectacular of Saint-Exupéry’s landings.”
All three men fell upon Guillaumet, who crawled into his friend’s arms. The Argentines, like the French, dissolved in tears. Saint-Exupéry must have been as thrilled by the sight of Guillaumet as concerned by what he saw: his friend was a shriveled, frostbitten, sun-baked shadow of his former self. His face, reported the writer, “was splotched and swollen, like an overripe fruit that has been repeatedly dropped on the ground.” Guillaumet dismissed the tears that ran down his face in a quiet voice: “They’re from joy. Up there, I was not so weak.” In his report, Guillaumet stated simply that this first reunion with friends “had been exceedingly moving.” Lefèbvre and Saint-Exupéry remembered a few additional details and one line in particular, although each man felt it had been addressed to him. Guillaumet asked if his plane had been recovered. When hearing that it had not, he realized that, torturous though the week had been, he had been right to walk. Probably in response to this he added: “I swear that what I went through, no animal would have gone through.” For Saint-Exupéry it was the noblest line any man had uttered, one that splendidly defined his place in the universe. On no other count did Lefèbvre quibble with Saint-Exupéry’s version of events as recorded in Wind, Sand and Stars, save to say that the reunion had been, if anything, more overwhelming in reality.
Guillaumet had, on his seventh day in the mountains, stumbled upon a farmwoman, the wife of a grizzled smuggler, who had had trouble believing her eyes when she saw a man stumble out of the Andes. “Yo soy l’aviador perdido, muchos pesos,” Guillaumet shouted, with whatever strength was left to him. Introductions could be difficult under such circumstances; this was one of those casual lines created by the urgent shorthand of aviation. It was in a league with Beryl Markham, crashed off the coast of Newfoundland after having been the first to fly the Atlantic solo nonstop from east to west, introducing herself to two fishermen, blood dripping from her forehead, with “I’m Mrs. Markham. I’ve just flown from England,” or Charles Lindbergh’s “Which way is Ireland?” to the trawler below him while en route to Paris in 1927. The family had taken Guillaumet in, installing him in their only bed, and delivering him the following day by mule to the San Carlos authorities. In Mendoza, Guillaumet was met at the airfield by festive crowds, which he ultimately escaped to slip into a borrowed suit and call his wife, a beaming Saint-Exupéry at his side. Saint-Exupéry tucked him into a warm bed in Mendoza and nursed him with herbal teas over the next day and a half, returning him on Sunday afternoon, the twenty-second, to Buenos Aires. At the airfield crowds turned out to meet Guillaumet, whose ordeal had made the front page of every newspaper in South America, and whose fate was immediately written into a Chilean folk song. In Buenos Aires, Saint-Exupéry installed himself on the Guillaumets’ couch, from which he began an exuberant performance of the bawdiest songs in his repertoire, interrupting himself only to remind Guillaumet how hopeless the search had seemed from the air or to pry from his friend another detail of the ordeal. Evidently he wore out the convalescent a little. This revel went on all night with Saint-Exupéry tirelessly serenading and interrogating and serenading again, oblivious to the excited accompaniment provided by the Guillaumets’ dog, Looping, until Guillaumet somewhere found the strength to say, “It’s obscenely late, go to sleep.”
Guillaumet, who went on to fly more than an additional 100 trips over the Andes in a single-engined plane, was asked for his official report on the crash the day after his return to Buenos Aires. He delivered it immediately. It took Saint-Exupéry, who stuck to the facts but extracted from them something close to parable, seven years to set the by then oft-told tale to paper. He grafted his view of man to the adventure, finding in Guillaumet’s stamina the acceptance of responsibility that was to his mind what made man great; it was the theme of the novel on which he was at work the year of the crash, as that of all of
his subsequent writing. If Guillaumet had moved mountains it was a moral quality—and not an adventurer’s disdain for death—that had saved him. He had walked out of the Andes because he had turned his body into a tool, because he had remained steadfast to his fellow men and their common enterprise. (He made no mention of Madame Guillaumet.) In honoring these modest bonds Guillaumet had proved himself a man of courage. Saint-Exupéry wrote no more of the slayers of dragons who had peopled his first story and novel. It was to the nobility of a gardener—a man bound by love to his cultivable land—that he compared the triumphant Guillaumet, in an image that recalled that of the newborn Bark, or of the Patagonian settler. Here was another man who, dwarfed by his environment, had proved anything but puny.
This account of Guillaumet’s ordeal, which began to take shape in a preface Saint-Exupéry contributed to a 1932 biography, which was first published integrally in a newspaper in 1937, and which found its home in Wind, Sand and Stars two years later, typified the way Saint-Exupéry inadvertently wrote himself into the history books. He did not mean to appropriate Guillaumet’s best lines, but over time they detached themselves from Guillaumet and got themselves attributed to Saint-Exupéry. People who heard Guillaumet’s story over dinner—and many did between 1931 and 1939, although not from Guillaumet—remembered its narrator; many would testify later that Saint-Exupéry had been the one to utter the line about man and the animal. Originally the story of Guillaumet’s story became Saint-Exupéry’s; later Guillaumet’s story became Saint-Exupéry’s. Today Hollywood would be a contender for the rights to dramatize the ordeal, and even in 1939 Saint-Exupéry was not alone in doing so. That year Jean-Gérard Fleury, a young lawyer and journalist who knew both men well, brought out his fine book on Aéropostale, which includes a version of the same events. His account is richer than Saint-Exupéry’s in the practical details and he, too, reprises the famous line, but it was left to Saint-Exupéry to supply Guillaumet’s interior dialogue, to add the rhetorical flourishes. Others too would have liked to have attached themselves to Guillaumet’s heroism. When Saint-Exupéry told Gide the story in France the following spring and mentioned that he hoped to make it a part of his next book, Gide asked if he could go over his text for him. “I shall never,” the veteran of French letters confided to his journal, “forgive him for spoiling it.” There was little cause for concern. Saint-Exupéry knew how to tell a tale, and it was in his words that Guillaumet’s feat was burnished into legend. It became a kind of fable, which he recounted over and over again, with remarkable consistency.
