by Stacy Schiff
He rose on the first to find the doors of the Hotel Savoy securely locked; it seemed for a minute as if he would be barred from doing what 4 million Muscovites were about to do. The noise of a thousand planes descending upon Moscow was all it took for him to slip his chains; he made his way into the street by way of a hotel window. As the airplanes roared overhead in formation the crowds advanced like an ice floe through the freezing streets toward Red Square. They were directed on their march by police barriers and gatekeepers; as Saint-Exupéry watched they were commanded to stop, presumably to allow for some other ice floe, easing its way down another street, to empty into Red Square. The wait was long, and the air was cold. The Frenchman then witnessed a miracle: the “unified solid mass suddenly melted into single human beings.” On their way to Red Square thousands of men and women fell into ragged circles and began to sing and dance. For a moment Moscow appeared to Saint-Exupéry—who chose to forget the snow—“like any Paris suburb on a July 14th night.” Then the musical instruments were put away and the banners were raised and the lines re-formed and the crowd continued on its sober way, to pay tribute to Stalin. Even in a sea of unfamiliar gray faces Saint-Exupéry had eyes only for the individual; he had tipped his only political hand early on in his reportage.
Eleven days went by before his next piece—because, according to legend, there were few good cigarettes to be had in Moscow and Saint-Exupéry could not write without them. Probably he could have come up with a better excuse himself; years later he was patiently to explain to his American publisher that he was late with a chapter of Flight to Arras because his guardian angel had appeared and demanded that he attend instead to a different project. The angel had stayed to talk; he could not very well have shown a guardian angel the door! Evidently having obtained a nicotine fix—possibly from the French embassy, possibly from Joseph Kessel’s journalist brother, Georges, who had met him at the station on his arrival and who shepherded him around Moscow—he called Paris on the thirteenth with his best-known piece. Ostensibly an account of his trip across the continent to the Soviet Union, he reported that his train had “cut an unswerving path across a Europe torn by anxieties and hostility,” then went on to ignore current events altogether. The third-class cars of the train had been crowded with Polish workmen, expelled from a depressed France in a fresh rash of xenophobia. For the second time public transportation offered Saint-Exupéry a great epiphany: he saw in the workers the same uncultivated, defeated men, the “lumps of clay” he had glimpsed in the Toulouse tram. In 1935, however, he thought not only like a hero of the sky but like an aristocrat. Taking a seat across from one couple, he was surprised to discover a cherubic blond child sleeping soundly between his parents. “Forth from this sluggish scum had sprung this miracle of delight and grace,” he explained in a line one could get away with, barely, in a front-page article in France in 1935. (He neglected to point out that these very “lumps of clay” were the miners, the gardeners, the blacksmiths whose work he celebrated elsewhere.)
Hervé Mille impatiently awaited this second of Saint-Exupéry’s dispatches in the Paris-Soir offices on the morning of May 13. He expected the piece for the next day’s front page, for which press time was fast approaching. Finally, near noon, his correspondent called in; to save time, Mille put him on the line directly with Madame La Rosa, the paper’s ablest secretary, who typed as Saint-Exupéry read. Mille sat down next to her in the cubicle, reading over her shoulder. All went well until Madame La Rosa reached the third page of the article and began to transcribe the story of the golden-haired child. “This is the child Mozart. This is a life full of beautiful promise. Little princes in legends are not different from this,” she typed, transcribing the line which would provide Mille with the piece’s title. “This little Mozart will love shoddy music in the stench of night dives. This little Mozart is condemned,” continued Saint-Exupéry, but Madame La Rosa was at a standstill. “What’s wrong?” demanded Mille. “I can’t continue, I can’t. It’s too beautiful,” she sobbed, tears streaming down her face.
On the nineteenth the writer became the first foreigner to fly in the Maxim Gorki, the world’s largest aircraft and the pride of the Soviet Union. The next day he became the last, when the forty-two-ton plane collided in midair with one of its escort planes and crashed, killing forty-three people. Saint-Exupéry’s description of the propaganda plane—equipped with a cinema, printing presses, a radio station, and conference rooms—turned then into what was increasingly becoming his specialty: a eulogy. For Paris-Soir he wrote up an account of his inspection of the 7,000-horsepower monster, of its communications system (the Maxim Gorki had loudspeakers enabling it to “speak above the roar of its motors to those listening on the ground”), its on-board pneumatic tube system, its electric-power plant, its telephone operators, its secretaries. Doubtless the gadget-lover in him was impressed, even if the Breguet 14 pilot was horrified. “My impression was of a complex, highly organized group activity such as I had never experienced in my own flying,” he reported evenly. For the Journal de Moscou on the twenty-third he wrote an elegiac account of the camaraderie that had produced the Maxim Gorki. It sounded like an endorsement of Communism but was instead his usual expression of admiration for “la camaraderie professionelle”: “This dedication to the métier gave me—every bit as much as the roar of the eight motors—the impression of a force on the move.” No one should too much mourn the Maxim Gorki, wrote Saint-Exupéry, surely more inclined than most people to admit that accidents happen; its memory would surely spawn new triumphs.
His last Russian piece, headlined “A Curious Evening with ‘Mademoiselle Xavier’ and Ten Tipsy Old Ladies Lamenting Their Youth,” appeared on the twenty-second. He was always clever on the page but in the longest of his Russian articles he was downright droll; he had reached the end of his assignment and was this time entirely in his element as a foreign correspondent. He had learned that some 300 Frenchwomen in their sixties and seventies, governesses of the daughters of the old regime, were still scurrying around a transformed Soviet Union, “as invisible as virtue, duty, and good breeding.” Unemployed and forgotten, they lived from hand to mouth. After an unpromising start—he asked directions in French and got them in Russian, English, and Danish before he finally found his way—he caught up with one “Mlle. Xavier.” He landed on her doorstep much as he had arrived on that of the Nouakchott sergeant; he was the first Frenchman to cross Mlle. Xavier’s threshold in thirty years, and she wept at the sight of him. So proud was she to share a bottle of Madeira and a plate of cakes with her visitor that she left the door to her room open. The seventy-two-year-old wanted the neighbors to be jealous of her gentleman caller. Saint-Exupéry quizzed her about current events—“What does a revolution mean to the gray mouse? How does the mouse survive when everything is tumbling down around its ears?” he wondered—and reveled on the page in her story of its having passed her by.
That evening Mlle. Xavier arranged for her visitor to meet ten of her friends. He provided the Port and the wine and the liqueurs, they provided the tearful memories of their far-off French years. Saint-Exupéry had a fine time, describing himself as a “Prince Charming, drunk on glory and vodka and surrounded by lots of little old ladies who kept kissing my cheeks.” Before the drink and song had ended a rival appeared on the scene in the form of a sober Russian gentleman. He was made to reveal to Saint-Exupéry his claim to fame in the governesses’ eyes: in 1906 he had played roulette in Monaco. It was 1:00 a.m. when Mlle. Xavier and a colleague ceremoniously escorted the correspondent to a taxi. His first friend leaned unsteadily on his arm, whispering that he must come back the following year. “You’ll come to see me before the others? I’ll be the first, won’t I?” she entreated, leaning closer to his ear, staggering ever so slightly. Sent to investigate a brave new world, he had unearthed the relics of a vanished one.
Saint-Exupéry’s account of the evening with Mlle. Xavier, like all of his Paris-Soir pieces, met with an enthusiastic rece
ption. On his return to Paris he would have a more difficult time than ever staving off distractions: he was now in demand as a reporter and could easily have managed a substantial Parisian rent on the salary of one. What was more, at about the same time he proved to be a successful screenwriter; either just before or just after the Russian trip he sold a screenplay to the director Raymond Bernard, Tristan Bernard’s son. Escot remembered that he had tossed it off quickly, in a matter of days; a final draft was typed up while Saint-Exupéry was in Moscow. A love story, Anne-Marie is by far the frothiest of his literary efforts. The title character is a stunning twenty-year-old engineer who is adopted and taught to fly by an inseparable group of pilots who—paternally and selfishly—do their best to shield her from love, who appears on the scene in the form of a happy-go-lucky inventor.
The screenplay’s tone is frivolous but its themes are familiar. The Bach-playing inventor tends a rose garden on his terrace, which he tenderly removes to his apartment at night, when it is cold; in the screenplay (though not in the film) his father was a wealthy cultivator of roses. The pilots—who are relieved from any great need to identify themselves, as they are named the Farmer, the Detective, the Thinker, the Lover, and the Boxer—live entirely for their brand of masculine friendship. They can easily justify keeping Anne-Marie to themselves: “Theirs is a hard and bitter life. After the night, the storms, they are entitled to rediscover a calm garden and their childhood games.… They have no rosebushes, no stars, no music to console them their fatigue, their fear.” They need their protégée; she may well be a pilot, but locked up in the tower of their devotion she remains, more importantly, a chaste and loyal little girl. They understand that she is sentimental and so as to occupy her heart nominate the Thinker to court her with an anonymous series of billets-doux. Love triumphs, contrivedly, in the end, after the Thinker is sacrificed to the plot, after that tragedy reveals the depths of Anne-Marie’s feelings for the inventor, after the inventor ingeniously saves her life when she has lost her bearings in the night sky.
None of this worked much better on the screen than on the page, although Annabella—who would go on to become Mrs. Tyrone Power and a good friend to Saint-Exupéry in America—pranced her way through the title role with aplomb, and although the inventor’s rescue of Anne-Marie—he leads the five aces to an electrical power plant where he signals in Morse code to the lost plane with the lights of the entire city of Angoulěme—is stunning. Released in 1936, Anne-Marie set no box office records. Graham Greene, who reviewed the film that year, was not alone in finding it themeless and “quite amazingly silly.” Others remarked on the production’s similarities to The Perils of Pauline. Somehow the collision of the world of men and adventure and the world of roses and music worked less well when bullied into a happy ending.
Most likely Anne-Marie was not the screenplay with which Saint-Exupéry had been toying in South America during the summer of 1930. That project almost certainly turned into a thriller called Igor, of which he wrote several different versions. Never filmed, Igor traced the voyage of a political agitator from the dock in Rio de Janeiro to Europe, aboard a French vessel. The story delights in irony: in one version the celebrated criminal manages to impose his authority on several of the passengers on this ship of fools, all of whom should recognize him from police descriptions. In another, he appears to be apprehended at the end of his crossing. In the last scene we discover we have been trailing the wrong man; Igor is seen back at work, happily fomenting far-off revolution. Later Saint-Exupéry was to dispense with the Igor character altogether and write many of the same elements into a second screenplay for Raymond Bernard. Sonia took its name from one of the Spanish dancers who, with her generous embraces, helped spread disease throughout the ship. Essentially her story is that of Igor transformed into a rousing tale of heroism, courtesy of a group of aviators who fly serums from all over the continent to the Bordeaux harbor, arriving in the nick of time to save the 5,000 ailing passengers of the quarantined ship. (The speedy transport of medicines was to prove the fulcrum for the plot in the movie version of Night Flight as well; on the screen it spoke with an urgency the mail did not.) At some point in 1935 Saint-Exupéry began to think as well about a film adaptation of Southern Mail, to which he was to devote himself the following year. He saw these projects as a means of paying the rent, not as a future; once again he was biding his time while his heart was elsewhere. In March his name had been added to the end of a list of clients for whom Renault expected to turn out airplanes, to be delivered after the twenty-ninth of April.
If the dream of every man is to fly, the dream of every pilot is to own an aircraft. This spring Daurat was busily organizing an ambitious—and short-lived—domestic airline with Beppo de Massimi; inaugurated in July, Air Bleu relied on night flights to promise next-day mail service anywhere along the six lines of its network for a three-franc stamp. It was not a popular idea politically—Air Bleu’s interests did not always coincide with Air France’s—although Saint-Exupéry did not hesitate to lend it his support; Daurat credited him with having written a number of unsigned newspaper pieces in Air Bleu’s defense. Daurat had involved Renault as an investor in the new company, which had received the government’s blessing on the condition that it receive no subsidy. Its services were to be performed in a Renault-manufactured Caudron-Simoun, a rapid new 180-horsepower airplane which sported the luscious curves of a 1940s automobile. The first French aircraft with a variable-pitch propeller, a standard feature on virtually all modern propeller-driven planes, the Simoun was a particularly light and efficient aircraft. Equipped with other contemporary amenities (like brakes on the wheels), it also boasted instruments which made flying without visibility possible. Quickly it went on to set most of the 1935 speed records.
Why Saint-Exupéry did not enter the Air Bleu ranks is unclear. A life of routine night flights over France may not have been of interest to him; he may not have been offered a job. He did turn up often at Le Bourget at Daurat’s side, freely offering his advice, and in some capacity Daurat was almost certainly instrumental in helping him to secure an airplane. Daurat may have managed to acquire a Simoun for Saint-Exupéry at the Air Bleu discount. It seems more likely that Caudron’s director, Henri Peyrecave, made the pilot a gift of the aircraft for publicity reasons, possibly at Daurat’s suggestion. If—in a less likely scenario—Saint-Exupéry purchased the Simoun by himself with his Paris-Soir and Anne-Marie earnings, he took advantage of a government subsidy that reduced its price from 128,000 francs to about 96,000 francs. He almost certainly took possession of the airplane early in the summer, on his return from Moscow and fresh from a two-week training program required periodically of reserve air force officers. Borrowing the first two letters of “Antoine” and the last two of “Saint-Exupéry” he christened the Simoun F-ANRY. Immediately he set out to introduce his friends to the new acquisition, in which he took a childish pride. It was by far the nimblest aircraft he had yet flown, and he showed off a little. After one such hair-raising demonstration he half-apologized to his passenger, Léon Werth, “I wanted to dazzle you a little.”
Saint-Exupéry did not venture out of France in his Simoun until his old Aéropostale colleague Jean-Marie Conty—holder of the Southern Mail audience endurance prize seven years before in Casablanca—devised a means for him to do so. A wiry, vibrant engineer with a fierce intellect and a pronounced taste for the mystical, Conty had a background similar to Saint-Exupéry’s. His father had been a high-ranking diplomat; four years Saint-Exupéry’s junior, Conty was also an alumnus of the École Bossuet. He had gone on to Polytechnique, and joined the airline in 1927. In his youth he had known Louise de Vilmorin, whom he had recognized in the Southern Mail portrait of Geneviève. It had been he who had tipped off Saint-Exupéry about the French governesses in Moscow, where he had observed them furtively stuffing their bags full of hors d’oeuvres at a Bastille Day celebration in 1934. Conty knew Saint-Exupéry was chomping at the bit, and one day, without realiz
ing what he was doing, prevailed upon a friend visiting from Egypt for help. “Come and see me in Egypt,” she told him as she boarded her train at the Gare de Lyon. “I will come by air, with Saint-Exupéry in his Simoun, if you can guarantee us a lecture there,” replied Conty. Days after her return to Cairo the friend cabled that she had arranged for five speaking engagements. Conty then took his proposal to Air France, convincing them that a lecture tour would put Saint-Exupéry to good use and well justify its nominal cost. In November, having recruited André Prévot, an Air Bleu mechanic who was to have a colorful career with the pilot, they set out in the Simoun for a 7,000-mile tour around the eastern Mediterranean.
From Paris the three men flew south to Casablanca, then east, via Algiers and Tunis, to Tripoli, Benghazi, and Cairo. Saint-Exupéry did the flying; Conty served as navigator. This was not difficult work: Conty described the in-flight conversations as going something like this: Saint-Exupéry: “Do you see ground?” Conty: “Yes, I see the ground.” Managing the budget proved more of an effort. The three spent every cent of what they earned on the road, consistently landing with empty pockets; although they played to full houses, the profits were nominal. In Cairo, where Conty and Saint-Exupéry visited a recently excavated tomb, Saint-Exupéry succumbed to the bronchitis which had plagued him since Tunis. Conty was obliged to treat him with the cure of the day: leeches. These he applied to his friend’s broad back one night while the cooperative patient talked nonstop into his pillow. The narrator’s voice was a little muffled, but it was in this way that Conty heard the epic tale of Saint-Exupéry and the Patagonian cyclone. The three continued on to Damascus and Beirut, where they gave their talks on the fourteenth. The High Commissioner of France in Syria and Lebanon reported on their Beirut talk. Conty—meant to discuss the Air France network, past and future—did not get high marks, having in the diplomat’s mind delivered a vague, rambling talk. “As for Monsieur de Saint-Exupéry, in a speech devoid of all pretension, but in well-chosen words, the precision of which betrayed no particular effort, he very successfully revealed the psychology of the airline pilot.” He had been much applauded by the audience who had seen him at his best, despite a troublesome cough and a scratchy voice; generally Saint-Exupéry seized up when forced to speak publicly. All the same, the diplomat did not feel that the agreeable hour justified its expense, as no one went away from the lecture particularly well-informed about Air France’s operations. His reaction was representative. Despite Saint-Exupéry’s lectures, despite the records Mermoz continued to set throughout these years, France had by now largely lost her interest in the air.
