by Stacy Schiff
~
Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry, on the other hand, never told the story of having met her husband the same way twice. It seems safe to say that the twenty-eight-year-old widow—who claimed she had been nineteen at the time—first laid eyes on the pilot early in the fall of 1930.* The introductions were almost certainly made by Benjamin Crémieux, then the head of French PEN and an acquaintance of Saint-Exupéry’s from NRF and Monnier circles. Probably best remembered for having translated and brought to French attention the works of Luigi Pirandello, Alberto Moravia, and Italo Svevo, the inexhaustible diplomat—author—cultural emissary traveled that August to Buenos Aires to deliver a series of lectures. It would have been altogether appropriate for this energetic internationalist to have been the one to introduce Saint-Exupéry to Señora Gómez Carrillo, a native of El Salvador, the widow of a well-established journalist, and a longtime resident of France. Crémieux was forty-three at the time; he may only have met Señora Carrillo on the boat en route to Buenos Aires, but he would have known of her already. He almost certainly spoke of Saint-Exupéry, whose writing he admired and whose lifestyle was as ever a subject of fascination, before introducing the two. There is no reason to think he did so other than off-handedly, even if he himself admired the young woman’s liveliness, the ivory skin, the dancing eyes, the jet-black hair.
The presentations were made at a reception, either during the last week of August or the first of September, when demonstrations against the ruling radical party filled the streets, or just after September 6, when, with a brief show of force, a conservative government came to power in the first of Argentina’s modern army-led coups. These were not welcome events to Señora Gómez Carrillo, whose husband had enjoyed close ties with the ousted regime, or for Saint-Exupéry, who had the mail to worry about. Sometime after this first encounter, when Consuelo’s tiny hand—she was half Saint-Exupéry’s weight and her head came just to his shoulder—slipped into the aviator’s bearlike paw, the pilot introduced the widow to his great love, taking her up for her first flight in a Laté 28. On all other counts the record of the early days of their courtship was irrevocably if imaginatively obscured by Consuelo’s forty-eight years of variations on the theme.
A vivacious, fine-boned beauty, Consuelo Gómez Carrillo already had in 1930 some experience as the wife of a man of letters. A native of Guatemala City, Enrique Gómez Carrillo had arrived in Paris in 1892 as the correspondent for a Madrid newspaper. There he cut a dashing and reckless figure, rubbing shoulders with Joyce, Wilde, Verlaine, Zola, dueling at the slightest provocation, traveling widely, trailing behind him a hefty reputation as a syphilitic, traveling incessantly, publishing prolifically. Maurice Maeterlinck said of him that he had been a true Renaissance man, cramming three or four existences into one life and living them all more completely than most do one. He died, probably a suicide, in 1927. Gómez Carrillo’s second wife had been a popular music-hall singer named Raquel Meller, whom he had divorced six years before marrying Consuelo Suncin in 1926. He had been fifty-three at the time; she was probably in her early twenties. It was his third marriage, Consuelo’s second. Evidently he fell instantly for the Central American beauty, who either innately appreciated or quickly assimilated his flamboyance. We do not know how or when Consuelo Suncin arrived in Paris, and for certain only that she was born in Armenia, El Salvador. She was fond of saying that her father owned a vast coffee plantation but generally passed over all other references to her family, saying of her early years only that she had been born prematurely in an earthquake, which had turned the Suncin house around on its foundation and swallowed up her mother. (On hearing this story one reasonable friend asked how she could be sure that the earthquake had precipitated her early birth and not that her birth had precipitated the earthquake. The friend could have been wiser still: there was no earthquake in Armenia in either 1902 or 1907.) At the time she met Saint-Exupéry, she made her home in Paris, in a ground-floor apartment on the rue de Castellane, behind the Madeleine, and in a villa at Cimiez, above Nice, both of them homes left to her by Gómez Carrillo. Her friends were artists and writers, some of them left to her as well by her husband, her hobbies painting and sculpture, her lifestyle wholly bohemian. Didier Daurat described Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry as having much in common with her volcanic country: she was vehement, rash, bubbly, volatile, bursting with energy. Certainly she was more Latin than European, a fact that would have been clear in Buenos Aires, the most European of South American cities, where she may not have looked but certainly—to Saint-Exupéry—would have sounded exotic. Her voice was raspy, her French always colorful and approximate, buzzing with thickly rolled r’s. She was rarely described by anyone without recourse to the word “capricious,” an adjective that trailed her as inevitably as the word “distracted” did her husband.
All of Consuelo’s versions of her courtship with Saint-Exupéry have in common one element: that short trip in a Laté 28 during the first week of September. Assuming that the couple’s destiny was indeed sealed 2,000 feet above the Río de la Plata one evening early in the month, the events were said by Consuelo to have proceeded as follows: Not long after meeting him, possibly the very evening of Crémieux’s introduction, Consuelo found herself aloft with Saint-Exupéry. In order to coax her out on this excursion, the pilot had had to invite along eight or ten of her friends as well; he may have promised them a view of the revolution from the air. The friends filled the Latécoère’s cabin; Consuelo found herself alone in the cockpit with the pilot. Suddenly, over the noise of the motor, Saint-Exupéry asked for a kiss. She virtuously responded either a) that she was a widow, b) that in her country one only kissed people one loved, c) that there were places in the world where certain flowers, when brusquely approached, closed up, or d) that she never kissed anyone under duress. The response, which rings true and on which Consuelo permitted herself no variation, came back: “I know why you don’t want to kiss me. I’m too ugly.” To this the young widow made no answer. A few seconds later the dejected pilot threatened, “Oh well, since you don’t want to kiss me I’m going to dive into the Río de la Plata and we are all going to drown!” With this, tears evidently welled up in his eyes. Terror-stricken and a little moved, Consuelo deposited a meek kiss on Saint-Exupéry’s cheek. Under her breath she added, “You’re not ugly”. The aircraft returned safely to the field at Pacheco some minutes later, but not soon enough to return Consuelo’s musician friends to a concert engagement in Buenos Aires. A small scandal reportedly ensued. This version of events may have been tacked on to the story, inspired by the June episode with the visiting French actors who had been held over in Paraguay.
Consuelo returned to France before the next few months were out, having made some claim on the pilot’s heart, enough for him to have shown her an early draft of Night Flight, possibly to have asked as well for her hand in marriage. Her version of these events is irresistible, if undocumentable: Late one night, in a restaurant that she felt Saint-Exupéry had kept open expressly for his purposes, he offered her a letter of eighty pages. It was in fact an early draft of Night Flight, signed with the line “Your husband, if you consent.” If such a document ever existed it has never turned up. Saint-Exupéry himself left no record of the courtship: we do not even know if the marriage proposal was made on Argentine or French soil, in 1930 or 1931. He did not write home regarding his intentions this fall, something he might have been a little reluctant to do in any event, having already set off one false alarm. His silence may all the same have been telling. In mid-December he received a ceremoniously worded reprimand from Daurat. The company, while it recognized that such matters were of a private nature and did not like to meddle in them, wished to inform Monsieur de Saint-Exupéry that its Toulouse office had received a visit from one of his relatives. Saint-Exupéry had not written his mother since early October. It was hoped that he would demonstrate a little less negligence in the future.
Even allowing for Saint-Exupéry’s reticence on the subje
ct of the courtship, we do know a certain amount about the background to it. For eight years now the pilot claimed to have been looking for a wife. He felt his age acutely. From July to September Renée de Saussine had been in Brazil, where she played a number of enthusiastically reviewed concerts; although she had warned Saint-Exupéry of the trip, she had not gone out of her way to contact him on her arrival. He found out by accident that she was in Rio and then had trouble getting her to fix a date when they might meet. He was pained by these slights. (Ironically, Renée was traveling with Louise de Vilmorin, for whom his affection had by no means diminished.) Insofar as the courtship itself can be reconstructed we know this: Saint-Exupéry was a lousy if successful flirt. He tended to sidle up to a woman who caught his eye a little bashfully, with a mathematical formula or a work-in-progress; it makes sense that he approached Consuelo in this way. He was not promiscuous, and was clearly in 1930 more interested in the tenderness and shelter a woman could provide than in her social standing. He had little reason to think he would ever again live—or wish to live—in France, and may have felt he could play a little looser and faster with her social rules because of this. For five years now he had had no fixed address. Despite his protests, he clearly preferred some degree of nomadism to the numbing effects of bourgeois life that he feared marriage entailed. Consuelo could be relied upon to keep any man off the ground, off balance, on a perpetual adventure; here was an antidote to the numbing effect of conventional marriage, or at least marriage to a conventional party. Presumably this mattered more to him now than it had in 1923; he could not have been unaware that Consuelo seemed an odd choice for him in the milieu in which he was raised, which may have explained his silence of October and November.
Consuelo did not on any count seem the type to settle down. She was a woman who appeared to be lighter than air, free as the wind, who could move at a moment’s notice. She was arguably better at doing so than at making plans in advance. Hers was decidedly not the motto of Isabel Burton, the explorer’s wife, who had learned to “Pay, pack, and follow”; Consuelo had trouble with at least two of those directives. When she attempted them—as she did once in the early days of the marriage, when she was to meet her husband at Charles Sallès’s home in the south of France—her baggage arrived but she, and the mink coat with which she was traveling, did not, although they, too, parted ways. In Paris she was known to wave her lovely pale arms but not her pocketbook in the air as she waltzed out of taxis and past the guardians of the city’s finest eating establishments with the vague—and generally untrue—assurance, “The Count de Saint-Exupéry will be arriving shortly.”
If Consuelo did not correspond to Saint-Exupéry’s physical taste in women she did fill his need for what his American translator described as “frail, young, gentle persons with whom he could feel perfectly secure.” She was the perfect match for a man who would be said to violate all sense of time and space, “who scorned both the customary sequence of the hours and their usage.” Far more so than even Louise de Vilmorin—to whom he had recently written that he wanted for a woman to spirit him away to a private “little eternity,” where he could feel at home—Consuelo Gómez Carrillo hailed from another planet. To her Saint-Exupéry was a tree, a camel, a dragon, a lumbering bear; initially she was his “little tropical bird.” In his letters, she was more often than not “Ma petite filled or “Petite fille poète” He had years before confided in Renée de Saussine his very un-French conviction that a fault of grammar was pardonable but that a fault of rhythm was not: Consuelo’s command of grammar was original at best, but she had abundant rhythm. Her strong suit was the spinning of tales. Some call this mythomania. To Saint-Exupéry, a man who worried that the Fuchs daughters of Concordia would one day be swept off by a suitor who claimed to admire their wild gardens but in fact intended to turn them into the manicured grounds of Versailles, it was charm incarnate. He had, in short, met a woman who would see in a drawing of a hat a boa constrictor digesting an elephant.
In January 1951, if his long-range plans were, as Consuelo claimed in her various accounts, already clear to him, Saint-Exupéry had a chance to reveal them to his mother. She arrived in Buenos Aires for a month-long visit at the beginning of the year. The Countess and the future Countess de Saint-Exupéry did not have a chance to meet in South America, as Consuelo had already returned to France, where her suitor was soon to follow. Assuming that Consuelo left Buenos Aires at the last possible moment—it has been suggested that the two women’s ships crossed in the harbor, although the truth is certainly less tidy—this allowed, at most, for a four-month courtship.
Madame de Saint-Exupéry arrived in Buenos Aires for the hottest weeks of the year. Her son had seemed to want to forestall the visit, possibly because of his sentimental life, possibly because, as he claimed, he was flying a great deal, and had an enormous amount of work, and could not be certain that he would be on hand to welcome his mother to the capital. Early in the month, in what was almost certainly the first flight she made with her son, she joined him on a trip to Asunción. He introduced her to the Donys, with whom the Saint-Exupérys dined on January 31, 1931, the night before they were to sail together for France, Saint-Exupéry having been accorded a leave. The pilot insisted on ending the evening at the Buenos Aires amusement park, where he hauled Paul Dony on every ride. (Or on nearly every ride: Noëlle Guillaumet remembered having been unable during her time in Buenos Aires to convince either Saint-Exupéry or her husband to join her on the park’s loop-the-loop, which the two pilots found too violent.) Madame Dony and Madame de Saint-Exupéry watched from below as husband and son whirled and tilted and tumbled; Saint-Exupéry had the time of his life. Three weeks earlier, he had carried the mail from Buenos Aires to Asunción in what he knew was to be his last South American flight, inviting Dony to join him. At Posadas, 200 miles southeast of Asunción, they dropped off a passenger. From this point on the pilot hedge-hopped his way to the Paraguayan capital, barely clearing the fences around fields, sending the livestock off in all directions, heading directly down roads even as they led through woods. Turning up the Río Paraná toward Asunción, he forced a fisherman to dive into his boat for cover so as not to be hit by the landing gear. The Paraguayan ventured up only to wave a fist in the air. In the cockpit Saint-Exupéry was exultant.
On the morning of February 1, the pilot and his mother boarded the Alsina, along with the pet puma Saint-Exupéry insisted on bringing back to France for Gabrielle. (The animal never made it to Agay. After it attacked an officer of the ship, it was sold on the high seas to another passenger.*) Presumably Saint-Exupéry left for France with as little idea of his next posting as he had had in setting sail for Buenos Aires in September 1929; in any case, he was never again to set eyes upon the coast of South America. Exactly ten years later Eve Curie would overfly it while making a war correspondent’s tour of all anti-Axis territories, from North America to China. The abandoned French hangars that dotted the South American coast made, she wrote, for a miserable sight. They revealed nothing of the greatness of Mermoz and Guillaumet; they were rotten and moldy.
* The city benefited from no zoning at all until 1934, by which time it was far too late to consider Le Corbusier’s suggestion.
* The account of Saint-Exupéry and the cyclone, which belongs to the English- but not the French-language edition of Wind, Sand and Stars, appeared in France as a newspaper piece in 1939.
* An exquisite, sterling-silver replica of the airplane, crafted by Tiffany’s and offered to La Maison Française at Rockefeller Center by the French government, sits today in the lobby of 610 Fifth Avenue.
* There is a five-year discrepancy between the birthdate on Consuelo’s marriage license—1902—and the birthdate officially reported at the time of her death—1907. Neither figure is verifiable. I have assumed the former to be true as we more commonly err in the opposite direction when misstating such facts, and as Saint-Exupéry would—insofar as he was interested in such things—have believed his
wife was born in 1902.
* Saint-Exupéry was not the only one to give in to the temptation of exporting South American fauna, with which he had often enough flown. Blaise Cendrars sailed from Brazil to France at about this time in the company of 250 tropical birds and sixty-seven marmosets, few of which ever saw the Continent either.
X
~
Brightness Falls
1931–1933
Mistily I realized that the harsh days of my solitary battling had passed.
T. E. LAWRENCE,
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
Not since the summer of 1926 had Saint-Exupéry been footloose in France for any extended period of time. Never before had he been at liberty and solvent. He was now a published writer, carrying his new manuscript—along with a screenplay penned in Argentina—around with him in his bag; he was gainfully employed; he was in love, and this spring officially engaged. Early in April he was awarded his Légion d’Honneur. He was thirty years old. He appears to have made the rounds, in high spirits. There was much to celebrate. Unsurprisingly, not a single piece of personal correspondence survives from this period.
