Saint-exupery: A Biography

by Stacy Schiff

  On the return to France in mid-February Madame de Saint-Exupéry had gone to Agay and her son had immediately sought out Consuelo, who claimed she had spent the intermittent weeks in mourning out of fear that her new suitor would not come for her. Evidently she thought it preferable to observe his death than to risk being stood up. Reunited, the lovers spent the better part of March in the south of France, mostly at Consuelo’s home in Nice, where Saint-Exupéry set about energetically cutting and revising the 400-page manuscript of Night Flight, which he was to trim by more than half. Consuelo most likely introduced her fiancé at this time to the Maeterlincks, who lived in a palatial home nearby; Saint-Exupéry introduced Consuelo to Yvonne de Lestrange in Agay, where his fiancée had already met the family, at the end of the month. Vacationing with Yvonne de Lestrange at the Hôtel de la Baumette was André Gide, to whom Saint-Exupéry now recounted Guillaumet’s tale. At the same time he shared with him the manuscript of Night Flight, with which Gide was much impressed, and which he offered to preface. This proposal must have surprised as much as delighted author and publisher. It was true that Gide admired and had translated Conrad, but he was better known as a champion of personal freedom than as an endorser of duty. In his journal on March 31 the senior statesman of French letters noted: “Greatly enjoyed seeing Saint-Exupéry again at Agay … he has brought back from Argentina a new book and a fiancée. Read one, seen the other. Congratulated him heartily, but more for the book; I hope the fiancée is as satisfactory.”

  In the end it was Madame de Saint-Exupéry more than anyone who hastened the marriage. She was uncomfortable with the fact that the couple had set up house forty miles away, not very discreetly, without having taken any vows. Consuelo reported that her future mother-in-law made frequent trips to the villa at Cimiez, inquiring at each visit, “When will you finally marry?” The wedding was held in the chapel of Agay on April 12; Abbé Sudour, who had probably not yet had a chance to congratulate Saint-Exupéry on the Légion d’Honneur he had been instrumental in securing for him, officiated. Twice-widowed, the bride wore black lace, in which she looked stunning; Pierre and Gabrielle d’Agay’s three children, the two daughters in long, organdy skirts and their son, François, in a crisp white sailor suit, served as attendants, accompanied by Consuelo’s Pekingese, Youti. In photographs, taken in the château garden, in full bloom and sweetly scented by purple and white stock, the bride and groom look solemn but not unhappy. A small crowd assembled in the afternoon to celebrate at Agay’s finest restaurant, Les Roches Rouges, with an elaborate meal. The union was made official only on the twenty-second of the month, when the couple paid a visit to the town hall in Nice to obtain their civil license, a formality that traditionally precedes the religious ceremony and is in France the binding one. Saint-Exupéry gave his address as the Château d’Agay, Consuelo as an apartment on the avenue David in Nice. As his profession, Saint-Exupéry listed “piloteaviateur.” At four that afternoon the couple were pronounced legally wed. The honeymoon, insofar as it had not been taken already, was spent on the Riviera, between Agay and Cimiez.

  It is to be hoped that Saint-Exupéry was distracted by the preparations for these festivities, by his version of domestic bliss, by the manuscript of Night Flight. If not his heart may well have been breaking during these months. Practically since his return to France, Aéropostale had been in the news, rarely in a favorable light. As a result of the October 1930 revolution in Brazil and the fallout from Wall Street in 1929, three of Marcel Bouilloux-Lafont’s banks had filed for bankruptcy. The owner’s financial situation consequently came under close scrutiny. He may have been the head of the world’s longest airline, one that trumpeted the glory of France around the globe, but he was also the beneficiary of generous government subsidies. To some it now looked as if these funds had been misappropriated. The first of these facts may have proved more offensive than the second, government subsidies being something of a common denominator in France but resounding success a subject of some resentment. Early in March, the Chamber of Deputies voted against according the airline a new subsidy; late in the month—less than a year after Mermoz’s triumph over the South Atlantic and just as Bouilloux-Lafont had begun planning an assault on North America—Aéropostale was forced into liquidation.

  Shortly after Saint-Exupéry’s wedding, Mermoz was heard on the radio, expounding upon the injustice of the company having been “done in by political and financial scheming.” On May 5 the Journal de l’aviation française commented harshly on the irresponsibility of the ministries of air and finance, which had allowed “banking rivalries, envious foreigners, jealous Frenchmen, and socialist intrigues” to eat away at one of France’s finer institutions. There was no end to the finger-pointing involved in a particularly messy affair, played out as publicly as it was negotiated covertly, in the end reflecting poorly on all concerned. In the spring of 1931 the battle had only just begun, but already the airline to which Saint-Exupéry was to return in May was a different operation from the flourishing company of 1930. It had had trouble meeting its February payroll; in South America, the mail went on even in the absence of paychecks, which after three months were finally supplied by the French embassy. The company began cutting back on personnel and by June suspended service to five countries. By the end of the year, additional routes would be shut down, and the airplane that might have claimed the North Atlantic for the French, the Latécoère 38, retreated to its hangar, where it would corrode to death. Already Aéropostale—provisionally operating under a state-assigned board of directors—had become a subject of hand-wringing and embarrassment and outrage instead of one of national pride. In disgust one pilot concluded that the age of “belle aventure” had come skidding to an end and that “l’ère de l’administration aérienne” had dawned. Saint-Exupéry, perhaps because his mind was elsewhere, perhaps because he was so gifted at the sustaining of nostalgia, certainly because he had little patience for political intrigue, was all the same able to put off that dawn a little longer.

  By summer, having delivered his manuscript to Gallimard and having made a mid-June trip to Paris with Consuelo, he was back at work on the African run. Cutbacks in the Aéropostale budget evidently prevented him from returning to South America (they likely played a role in securing him the January leave), a decision he could not have minded. Now in a Laté 26 he began to fly the mail from Casablanca south to Port-Étienne, leaving Morocco late on a Sunday afternoon and adhering to a tight schedule down the coast, one that provided the rites by which he lived for a good part of the next two years. At Agadir he and the mail changed aircraft; the relay plane was up and running on their arrival. In his ten minutes of ground time Saint-Exupéry chatted with the mechanics as he gulped down an hors d’oeuvre of chocolate followed by a plate of fried eggs, a banana, and a glass of wine. Alexandre Baïle, the chief of the airfield, provided a word on the weather and—the mail having been transferred—saw to it that the pilot made a prompt departure. As the sun set over the desert Saint-Exupéry forged on to Juby, three and a half hours to the south. Here another plate of fried eggs awaited him; in his ten minutes on the ground he traded memories with the Spanish officers who still occupied his former home. Jean-Gérard Fleury, who met Saint-Exupéry this September when the pilot was asked to take him along to Port-Étienne as a passenger (Fleury was at the time preparing a report on the convoluted Aéropostale scandal for a popular newspaper), never forgot the reception that greeted the aviator at Juby. He had traveled to the outpost—against the wishes of the pilot, whom Fleury had heard protesting to the chief of the Casablanca airfield that a passenger of Fleury’s size was going to cost him thirty gallons of fuel—in a wicker chair, which bounced around amid the mailbags in an open compartment behind the radio operator of the Laté. The plane had barely arrived at Juby when a troop of blue-veiled Moors threw themselves upon Saint-Exupéry, kissing his hand. They assembled around him, all speaking at once until orchestrated by the pilot, from whom they clearly wanted an opinion. A
little embarrassed to be playing the role of desert chieftain, Saint-Exupéry held court quickly, over a glass of water and a plate of eggs, settling the pressing issue with the little Arabic he possessed. Now in the hands of a well-connected journalist, the account of his diplomacy traveled back to France, where it did much to enhance his Parisian reputation as a tamer of the desert.

  The glory days were not entirely over: the Río de Oro remained dissident territory, and at Juby the interpreter was replaced with another, friendly with the R’Guibats of the south. Through the night the Latécoère continued on toward Port-Étienne, overflying Villa Cisneros to drop, quite literally, the mail, whereupon the chief of the airfield waved the plane on from the ground. With the dawn, Saint-Exupéry arrived at Port-Étienne, having flown for nearly twelve hours, a period of duty and under conditions that would be abhorrent to any member of the pilots’ union today. His stay in Port-Étienne lasted until the end of the week, when—the Buenos Aires mail having been sent up from Dakar—the trip would be repeated in reverse, landing Saint-Exupéry in Casablanca on Sunday morning, in time for an early breakfast of warm croissants and cafés au lait. The bulk of the newlywed’s week was thus spent in a Saharan outpost consisting entirely of a fort, an airfield, a barracks, and a fishery; Consuelo was in France, occasionally in the company of her new mother-in-law, or later in Casablanca for most of this time.

  Though larger, Port-Étienne boasted the same number of attractions as had Juby in 1927. The fishing was better, but swimming in the shark-infested waters was out of the question. Sandstorms and sandflies were so prevalent that the pilots had little choice but to live as shut-ins. Saint-Exupéry slept a good deal, generally during the day, writing at night. So much did he hold to his nocturnal schedule that he was said to be utterly confounded by the full moon, which can brilliantly illuminate a desert sky. At these times he generally slept for a full twenty-four-hour stretch. When awake he was in his element and, as always, quick to supply the much-needed entertainment. He traveled with a record of Ravel’s Boléro, to which he forced the inhabitants of Port-Étienne to listen ad nauseam. He recited Baudelaire for them (at the time “La Mort des Amants” was at the top of his list); he spun tales of a fictional childhood; he hypnotized the ground crew; he played an improvised version of battleship.

  For most of this period he was teamed up with a Corsican radio operator named Jacques Néri, as brilliant a match as could have been made. A 1929 recruit, Néri was a hugely talented radio-navigator; his preferred means of communication with his pilot was drawing, however. Not only was this easier to understand, he felt, but it was aesthetically more interesting. Once, having been advised by radio of less turbulence at a higher altitude, he chose to communicate this information to his pilot with a sketch of Saint-Exupéry laboring up a steep staircase with his aircraft on his shoulders, Néri trailing along behind at the end of the radio antenna. The staircase was marked 1,000 meters; a chubby-cheeked angel presided over it, blowing gently. Few could have appreciated Néri’s extra-aerial talent more than Saint-Exupéry, who may have been back in his element but knew as well as anyone how monotonous flying over the desert could be and who appreciated a quick wit under any circumstances. He needed no encouragement to respond to Néri’s creations in kind; the resulting correspondence turned into a sort of artistic competition. Saint-Exupéry went on to pay tribute to Néri in one of the more amusing episodes of Wind, Sand and Stars, but Néri did him one better: he saved a great quantity of the little scraps of paper passed between pilot and navigator during the second half of 1931. Taken together, these relics make for an alternate version of Night Flight. The preserved Néri—Saint-Exupéry correspondence, as published in the French review Icare, consists less of the ideograms that Saint-Exupéry later claimed he found so reassuring in the middle of a dark night than of the text of the terse, tragicomic drama that played itself out in the open cockpit of an airplane plying a night sky. Often the notes betray an eerily modern sense of two men, trapped alone in the dark in a tiny space, unable to communicate: “I told you to write instead of gesturing,” Saint-Exupéry instructed Néri, who replied: “I was saying I’d seen a flare.” More often they serve as fitting reminders of the still-unscientific nature of night flying: “Sure looks like land to me,” scribbled Saint-Exupéry, with a big question mark. “I’d love to know where we are (at this speed we could run out of gas), but I can’t afford to waste time detouring west.” Occasionally all went well: “Doesn’t look too bad,” reported Saint-Exupéry, “give me a cigarette.” Sophisticated though a Latécoère 26 was by comparison with a Breguet 14, instrument flying was still a thing of the future. “The compass is completely inaccurate, it’s shameful, it’s turning halfway around for five degrees,” grumbled the pilot who, perhaps on the same trip, informed Néri, “In my opinion we can’t be more than thirty miles from the sea. At daybreak we’ll head west and we’ll see, but for the moment I’m staying away because the fog will give me trouble with this idiotic compass. It turns like a top if we so much as angle west.”

  In Wind, Sand and Stars, it is with Néri that Saint-Exupéry has been drawn off course in the middle of a foggy night, en route for Cisneros. No airport can tell the two men their bearings, which makes them feel as if they have “slipped beyond the confines of this world.” The two set their cap on star after star, each time in the vain hope that they are actually headed toward an airport beacon. The first time the skies yield up a light, Néri, singing, begins to pound the fuselage with his fists. Lost in interplanetary space, hungry and thirsty, Saint-Exupéry dreams of the breakfast with which the two will celebrate if ever they return to earth; all the joy of being alive will be his in that first rich, burning mouthful of coffee. But the two remain hopelessly lost. When Néri asks that Cisneros blink its beacon three times, the light ahead “would not, incorruptible star, so much as wink.” (“The old flirt doesn’t want to wink at us! It’s a star,” wrote Néri during the actual flight.) Finally Néri hands his pilot a scrap of paper. “All’s well. Great news.” He has received a transmission from Casablanca, which he expects will save them. In fact the message has been delayed somewhere in the 1,250 miles of night sky and dates from the previous evening, when a government representative had sent out word that Saint-Exupéry was to be disciplined on his return for having flown too close to the Casablanca hangars. He had indeed done so but was never happy to be reprimanded, least of all when he was lost on the company’s behalf, in the night sky, in a dense fog, hoping for some more pertinent information. It was as if he had jumped overboard to save a shipmate and—upon asking from the open sea for a buoy—had been told that his socks were mismatched.

  Later, in a perfect illustration of his accelerated capacity for nostalgia, Saint-Exupéry was to bemoan the passage of the Breguet 14, the days when every trip constituted an adventure, when a pilot necessarily entered into an intimate relationship with the land below him. “I find,” he sighed not long after these flights with Néri,

  and in this I am not alone, that the Aéropostale has lost much of its charm since the advent of reliable motors and radiotelegraph. We no longer experience those little palpitations which were so pleasant: Will I make it? Will I not break down? Where am I? Those are the questions which we asked ourselves on each of our trips, in the olden days. Now our engines are foolproof; there is no reason to know our route because the directionfinder indicates it for us. Frankly, flying under these conditions is a bureaucrat’s affair. It’s a life without surprises. We like it as well, but the other …

  Even with Néri he worried that the desert—his desert, his dissidents, his R’Guibats, as Néri heard him express it—held little adventure anymore. He asked his radio operator countless times to tell him the stories of the olden days, which Néri did, with gusto. Yet he clearly still delighted in the work, making new sport of the radio navigators. An operator who flew with him during this period* told of a harrowing experience he had had one night, between Agadir and Cisernos, when the hole through
which his trailing antenna was meant to fit turned out to be blocked. Over the radio both Cisneros and Agadir were calling for the aircraft’s position, but he was unable to respond without the 350-foot antenna in place. Finally, trying not to think what Daurat would say were he to see him in action, he hammered a hole in the plane with a screwdriver and a pair of plyers. Through this he inserted the weight at the end of the antenna, then the length of cord itself, insulating it from the metal of the fuselage with his socks. He turned the power on; sparks flew out in all directions. Saint-Exupéry knocked on the divider and passed back a note: “You’re going to set us on fire, what the hell are you doing?” Already exasperated, the radio operator scribbled back, “It’s not as bad as that. We have parachutes, don’t we?” Saint-Exupéry smiled as he turned around; if there was room for insubordination clearly there was no cause for concern. The navigator added his scarf to the improvised insulation job and tried his radio again; it worked, although the antenna continued to fly free in the air, knocking against the side of the fuselage, producing a sea of violet sparks toward the tail. At this the interpreter woke up, not very reassured to be surrounded by a display of fireworks. The navigator ignored him and set about recontacting the ground with a system that may well have been jerry-rigged but which, for all its pyrotechnics, functioned.

  He was happily broadcasting away when a bright flame suddenly burst out on the port side of the ship where the antenna surfaced. Without a moment’s hesitation he sent out an SOS. Agadir emerged from the night to ask him to repeat the message, which had been garbled by static. Saint-Exupéry, half out of his seat, turned and gestured frantically: “Parachute, buckle up quickly, we’re going to jump!” The agitated navigator fumbled with his gear; the straps were stuck, he could not find the buckle. Meanwhile, from the radio came a worried, regular “Acknowledge, what’s going on?” At this point, leaning over to examine the port-side fire, he discovered that Saint-Exupéry had set off a flare, intended for emergency landings. The pilot’s shoulders heaved as he exploded with laughter at the controls; when the beleaguered navigator turned around, he found that the interpreter was also doubled over with laughter. Hugely pleased with himself, Saint-Exupéry spent his ground time retelling the story, all the way down the coast.