Saint-exupery: A Biography

by Stacy Schiff

  From Port-Étienne he wrote despondent letters. He was short even with his mother, who did not entirely approve of the way her son was running his life, socially or spiritually, and who begrudged him a little his marriage. Firmly he assured her that her fears were misplaced, that she was in no danger of losing another son. If anything he needed her tenderness now more than ever: “Maman, the more I’ve seen of the world, of hard countries, hard lives, hard men, the more it seems to me the only great virtue,” he wrote her this month. He was off-balance, no longer grounded by the exotic conventions of a country that had once entirely charmed him, probably too aware of the tenuousness of his position. His financial concerns were aggravated in the fall by a serious automobile accident Consuelo had in Nice, for which she was at fault. The repair bill for the couple’s Bugatti came to 3,600 francs but a far costlier lawsuit followed, necessitating the rental and ultimately the sale of the villa at Cimiez. It was the second refuge Saint-Exupéry was to lose this winter.

  ~

  October 1932 found the Saint-Exupérys back on the rue de Castellane in Paris, their bad luck in tow. Saint-Exupéry was once again on leave from the company, this time entirely of his own volition. Earlier in the year, he had promised Gaston Gallimard a series of articles on aviation for Gallimard’s new journal, Marianne, founded as an answer to the highly successful, right-leaning Candide. These pieces—the first fragments of what would become Wind, Sand and Stars—appeared now, just as the Aéropostale affair was reaching its tawdriest. While in every newspaper the company’s name was dragged through the mud, Saint-Exupéry could be read, in four of the first issues of the weekly, singing the praises of Bouilloux-Lafont’s great enterprise.

  By this time, Marcel Bouilloux-Lafont’s bookkeeping practices were of interest to no one, having been supplanted by the confessions of one Lucien Collin, secret agent. Posing as a disinterested newspaper reporter, “Lucco” had supplied a number of documents to Bouilloux-Lafont’s son, André, allegedly proving that a powerful French industrialist and the country’s director of civil aviation—acting with the collusion of Pierre Latécoère and Beppo de Massimi—had conspired to gain control of Aéropostale. They had done so with the sole purpose of putting the company in the hands of Deutsche Lufthansa.* The documents had been taken by an outraged Bouilloux-Lafont to the head of the Ministry of War, who had confiscated them. One of the letters had evidently come to Bouilloux-Lafont from André Tardieu, the former French prime minister; by now the Aéropostale scandal had grown to include not only secret agents and international conspiracies but a number of top-level ministers. Lucco, in reality a police informer, grandly testified that he had falsified the documents at the instruction of André Bouilloux-Lafont, who, he claimed, had dictated several of them. As a result of the trial young Bouilloux-Lafont, no one’s favorite in the first place, was arrested and sentenced to four months in prison. By now it was eminently clear to all concerned not only that Aéropostale had ceased to exist, but that the Bouilloux-Lafonts were finished as well.

  The October 26, 1932, issue of Marianne—the newspaper’s premiere—was crowded with articles on the scandal, studded with references to Lucco. Page two was given over entirely to Saint-Exupéry. The first of four “Pilotes de Ligne” essays began:

  Although there is a scandal in the Aéropostale service, we must not forget that pilots still devote themselves to their difficult calling far from political and financial discussions. Airplanes are flying along the route from France to South America as well as along the route from Marseilles to Algiers. Every day there are judicial hearings, but every day some pilot is called before another tribunal, dramatic and important in quite a different way. He is entrusted with bags of mail and human lives that he may have to defend a few hours later with more courage than one needs in an ordinary court, for he confronts single-handed a vast tribunal of storms, mountains, and seas, the three most common perils the airline pilot has to face. I am not today attempting to describe our work but simply what is peculiar to our existence and why—if this network of elaborate air routes were to disappear—we should feel as if we were losing with it a special way of thinking, feeling, and passing judgment which is unique in the world. This network represents a little, closed civilization whose language one cannot learn overnight. When I think of my colleagues I realize that if they were to vanish we should lose with them a fine race of men, born of the conventions and customs of the air and subject to its special morality, never to be replaced.

  Saint-Exupéry went on to celebrate his harrowing flight with Néri, Mermoz’s trials in crossing the South Atlantic, one of his magical encounters with the virgin desert. Doubtless he paid more attention to his choice of adjectives than to his political angle, but once again his name appeared in the wrong place at the wrong time. Taken as a whole, the issue seems an odd combination of the sacred and the profane; it is not easy to reconcile the pettiness of the accusations that flew fast and furious with Saint-Exupéry’s remembered grandeurs. The fallout was immediate.

  On October 31, the pilot wrote a long and indignant letter to Raoul Dautry, the president of the bankrupt company’s acting board of directors, a brilliant administrator who had made his reputation in railroads. Mermoz had told Saint-Exupéry what emotion his piece had stirred up; all sorts of political motives were being assigned to him when he was nothing more than a victim of coincidence. Six months earlier he had promised Gallimard three articles (four would run in all) for Marianne; he was not a man to go back on his word, and he had delivered his texts. At the time he had had no reason to think that when Marianne was launched Aéropostale would be so much in the public eye. Nor could he have foreseen that his article would follow a highly explosive piece by Emmanuel Berl, the paper’s editor, calling for the routing of Emmanuel Chaumié, the director of civil aviation implicated in the Lucco affair and an ally of Dautry’s. He could not and did not intend to address Bouilloux-Lafont’s financial practices, of which he was entirely ignorant, but he did intend to defend the noble enterprise itself. “This seemed to me,” wrote Saint-Exupéry, in an attempt to rise above the pettiness, “the only thing that was important.” The paper by no means represented his own political opinions: he could at the same time admire Daurat, Bouilloux-Lafont, and Chaumié and he did so, odd though that might seem in the present climate, when the three were waging an all-out war with one another, the first for his job and his reputation, the second for his company and his fortune, the third for the interests of the State.

  Moreover, Saint-Exupéry continued, this was not the first time he had been unfairly accused of partisanship. He claimed he had been recalled from the Marseilles–Algiers line “in a brutal and painful manner” for his literary sins. Night Flight could hardly be termed a political tract as it had been written the year before the events on which it was now said to bear had happened. Had no one noticed that the little book that had cost him his job in fact constituted an advertisement for the company? Nothing could have been less his intention than polemic, nor had he any favor to gain from Daurat. (He did not in this letter express his conviction that Daurat was innocent, a point he argued elsewhere without acknowledging that it constituted a political opinion.) Doubtless again from Mermoz, he had heard that he was being reproached because he was no longer flying. “But it seems to me,” he protested, “that I would still be flying if M. Verdurand had not recalled me to Paris with the sole objective of scoring a point against M. Daurat, as if I were a pawn, as if the company and not M. Daurat could not—out of gratitude for everything I had brought [to the airline], having asked for nothing in exchange, and which would have cost dearly coming from anyone else—let me simply work in peace, far from the critics, on one of the most difficult lines, one which I loved.” He had no desire to return to work now, and did not intend to do so until “the petty grudges were put to rest.” With the letter, as a courtesy, he enclosed his second piece for Marianne, which was to appear on November 2.

  A week after it did—this time Sa
int-Exupéry wrote of his initiation in Toulouse, his first experience of the desert, the enchanting night in Nouakchott—Dautry responded to his letter. While the acting board of directors was not particularly delighted with Saint-Exupéry’s eulogies to the company, they were happy to hear that the author intended to remain above the political fray. Artfully, Dautry suggested that it would be “infinitely regrettable” if a name like Saint-Exupéry’s were muddied in the scandal. So far as his assignment to the Marseilles–Algiers route went, the company had only been acting on Daurat’s instructions. The Marseilles–Algiers run had known a great number of accidents; while the company appreciated Saint-Exupéry’s thirst for new adventure, no one wanted to risk assigning a pilot unfamiliar with seaplanes to the dangerous route. It is unlikely that Saint-Exupéry felt better for having been told he had been turned away not for his political beliefs, but because he was a second-rate pilot. In an elegantly disingenuous twist, Dautry appealed to Saint-Exupéry’s own work: surely Saint-Exupéry must approve of such decisions, given the respect he had accorded discipline in his novel?

  Night Flight had turned out to be a Pyrrhic victory. When the pilot wrote Dautry again—he mailed an impassioned defense of Daurat on February 20, 1933—he had plenty of time on his hands; he had been unemployed for four months. As if to add insult to injury, the novel—inspired by a work of Jules Verne’s and by Saint-Exupéry’s memories of the refuge that was his childhood bed—could not escape political interpretation. In January 1933, Hitler came to power; to many, Night Flight suddenly read like a paean to fascism. Reviewing the novel in the Nation in September 1932, Clifton Fadiman had raised a red flag to this effect, calling Night Flight “a dangerous book.” Its reverence for Rivière sounded to Fadiman perilously like an endorsement of Mussolini; the novel was all the more dangerous because it was beautifully written, because it romanticized the triumph of the will. (It would not help that the novel was as successful in Germany as it had been elsewhere, nor, later, that Saint-Exupéry’s works would be held up by the Germans as an example of what was best about French literature.) Everything about the book seemed cursed. Even Gide carped that his preface had been misquoted and misconstrued, although Gide filed this complaint with some regularity, often with relish. In the fall of 1933, Clarence Rrown’s film of Night Flight appeared in American theaters. John Rarrymore claimed the role of Rivière and Lionel Rarrymore somehow ended up as Robineau; Helen Hayes, Clark Gable, Robert Montgomery, and Myrna Loy filled out the cast. Not unreasonably, Vanity Fair’s reviewer termed the result “as terrible an exhibition of gas-light acting as I’ve ever seen in my life.” For Clarence Rrown the reviews of Night Flight were no more unpleasant than the filming had been: he had had to direct a hopelessly drunk John Rarrymore.

  Ry the time Aéropostale had, for better or worse, made its way to the screen, the company had ceased to exist. Along with France’s four other airlines, it was folded on August 30, 1933, into a temporary company, of which one-quarter was state-owned, an entity that was soon to become Air France. If the comprehensiveness with which Aéropostale was swept under the new company’s carpet was any indication, Bouilloux-Lafont was either a very guilty or a very innocent man. Modern histories glide easily from the vision of Pierre-Georges Latécoère to the sophistication of Air France without pausing to remember his capitalistic ambitions; both bask in the reflected glory of the unmentioned middle era, purged from the record with remarkable vigor. (Bouilloux-Lafont does not so much as appear in a Larousse.) Didier Daurat would be resurrected, but the exmagnate would die in a run-down hotel room in Rio de Janeiro in 1944, mostly, it appears, of a broken heart. A farewell luncheon for Aéropostale was given by Dautry in Paris on July 31, 1933, to which Saint-Exupéry was not invited.

  Divisiveness runs deep in France, a country distinguished by what has been called its “people’s ineradicable love of political squabbles.” (De Gaulle made the same quality sound nearly romantic, referring to it as “notre vieille propension gauloise aux divisions.”) The characteristic was on full view in France between the wars, when the country exhausted forty-three governments in twenty-two years. To this day the Aéropostale scandal holds its mysteries, but few would argue with Jean-Gérard Fleury’s description of it as a clear-cut illustration of “the France of the Right and the France of the Left, the France of parties and clans.” Every step of it was political, from the early days, when Bouilloux-Lafont’s alleged mismanagement was seen by the leftists as a weapon to be used against Pierre Laval’s government, to the nationalizing instinct that guided and ultimately resolved the affair, government connections having been recognized as the single greatest asset to an airline company in these years. (It should be said that the idea to nationalize—which Bouilloux-Lafont would have resisted with all his might had he been given a choice—had been secretly bandied about as early as December 1930.)

  “Our country does not smile upon enthusiasm, demonstrations of faith, cooperative ventures,” noted Mermoz. Bouilloux-Lafont was a man who had in his control the world’s most ambitious airline, who had secured access to three continents and, in 1930, exclusive landing rights in the Azores, the key to the North Atlantic and thus to a fourth. His dazzling prosperity did not sit well with all concerned. The entrepreneurial spirit seems foreign in France, where the meaning of the word gets changed in the nontranslation: in French an entrepreneur is a contractor. For whatever political or financial reason, it seemed more important in 1932 that Bouilloux-Lafont—guilty or not of financial impropriety—be sacrificed than that a valuable state interest be left in his independent hands. A promising if not always profitable enterprise was scuttled in the process, and Aéropostale was thrown out with the Bouilloux-Lafont bathwater. Those who most benefited from its demise were the Americans, the British, and the Germans, to whom fell the spoils—including the North Atlantic, the best spoil of all, which Mermoz could have been flying by mid-decade.* The scandal went a long way to push the disillusioned Mermoz into the arms of the right-wing Croix-de-Feu. He had been sickened by the mess made of the airline and by 1936 was giving political speeches brightly tinted by his earlier anger:

  A ship’s captain is second only to God. We are dying in France for want of captains, and when we have one we spend our time criticizing and judging him. Among us, on the airline, a leader, the ship’s captain, isn’t criticized, isn’t judged. In any crew the copilot may be Front Populaire, the mechanic a Communist, the navigator a Socialist. None gives a damn about politics. We know we have 7,500 miles ahead of us, which represent sixty hours.… Of course I am accustomed, when I return to my earthbound life, to the usual betrayals and cowardice. This is the worst part of my life, but when one has a goal, an ideal, one surveys the obstacles along the road with contempt.

  Saint-Exupéry, too, subscribed to the mystique of leadership, but in search of a substitute for it went off in his own direction; the Aéropostale debacle did much to wean him from politics altogether. It was afterward abundantly clear to him that the “fine race of men” celebrated in his first Marianne piece had indeed not managed to survive the enterprise that had called them into being. Once burned, twice shy, he had no desire to take part in the backstabbing and blackballing of 1932 all over again; when faced with the fall of France he would attempt to play a neutral hand. Doubtless this would not have seemed so urgent a priority in 1940 were it not for the dire repercussions he suffered now. “It is terribly difficult, at a time like this, to remain true to oneself, to be of no party,” he wrote Dautry in 1932, during what must at the time have seemed the darkest autumn of his life.

  * This radio navigator may have been Néri, but he chose to relate the incident anonymously (which was not like Néri), in Présence des Retraités d’Air France (April 1973).

  * He was right about the weight of the Goncourt, an award so hotly contested that the publishers of runners-up have been known to print bellybands for their losing candidates that read “PRIX GONCOURT” and, in small print, “Four votes out of ten.” Toda
y writers maneuver their way around lesser awards so as to remain Goncourable.

  * Lucco’s was not a wholly far-fetched idea. A British air ministry report of 1931 reveals that there had been talk that year of combining French and German efforts in South America. These discussions would have taken place at a governmental level and out of the earshot of Bouilloux-Lafont, whose patriotism had led him to invest in the airline in the first place, and who would have been offended by such a suggestion. In 1934 Air France entered into a pooled agreement with Deutsche Lufthansa.

  * The exclusive landing rights Bouilloux-Lafont had secured for the French in the Azores were canceled by the Portuguese for nonperformance on October 7, 1933.

  XI

  ~

  Beyond the Call of Duty

  1933–1935

  What is true in a man’s life is not what he does, but the legend which grows up around him.

  OSCAR WILDE

  If there was a second act in Saint-Exupéry’s life it began here, in early 1933. For the next three years the aviator had more reason than opportunity to leave Paris, his new home. These were the last years in which he found work as a commercial pilot. Despite himself, he gradually became what so many aspire to be: a Parisian-based homme de lettres, a regular at the Brasserie Lipp and the Deux-Magots, a card-carrying member of the Republic of Letters, which—during the tumultuous 1930s, when governments came and went with dizzying regularity—staunchly, powerfully held its own. These are the largely undocumented years of his life, and he spent them documenting what had come before. They feel and must have felt slack to Saint-Exupéry, who spent them on the defensive, animated more by need than desire. “Saint-Ex had not an ounce of personal ambition,” noted a cohort of the 1930s, when it showed. He stood as a perfect incarnation of Kierkegaard’s unhappiest man: his future lay behind him, his past before him.