Saint-exupery: A Biography

by Stacy Schiff

  There was a bit of a problem at the Turkish border, where Saint-Exupéry was taken first, by a farmer, for a Bolshevik and then, by an unhelpful French consul, for a Turk, but the three pushed on to Istanbul and later to Athens, where they arrived on the twenty-second. With a Greek acquaintance, Saint-Exupéry and Conty set out for lunch in a little harborfront restaurant one afternoon. (Prévot, who was generally not greeted with the same pomp as the celebrity-lecturers, did not join them.) At the end of the meal there was a struggle over the check; the Greek insisted he must be the one to settle it, as he could guarantee it would be inaccurate. Sure enough, three dozen unconsumed oysters turned up among the hors d’oeuvres and a few more padded out the desserts. Summoned to the table, the restaurant manager acknowledged his mistake. “Yes, gentlemen, there were a few errors,” he admitted. “But you must forgive us; the times are so hard.” Saint-Exupéry adored this eminently humane explanation. Conty settled the bill, without paying for the oysters.

  From Athens Conty flew separately back to Paris, where his desk called. Saint-Exupéry sent immediately for Consuelo, without whom, his friend recalled, he suddenly could not go on. She arrived after Conty’s departure and flew home in the Simoun with her husband and Prévot on the twenty-fifth. It was a less than happy homecoming, partly because there was no longer a home to speak of.

  ~

  Consuelo’s address for part of the winter of 1935 was the Hôotel Pont-Royal on the rue Montalembert. Her husband did not join her there immediately; he continued to camp out on the rue de Chanaleilles, where he must have become expert at dodging the landlord. Increasingly the couple had begun to go their separate ways. The second-floor apartment on the rue de Chanaleilles was small—Werth described it as being so minuscule that the limbs from the trees in the courtyard garden took it over—and Consuelo had filled it with her friends, her sculpting materials, her disorder. Saint-Exupéry was by no measure in danger of being suffocated by bourgeois comfort, by the kind of wife Hemingway dismissed in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” as the “kindly caretaker and destroyer of his talent.” Years later Saint-Exupéry drafted a prayer for Consuelo, which she was to say each night. In part it read: “Dear Lord, save my husband, because he truly loves me and without him I would be an orphan. But make sure, dear Lord, that he is the first of us to die, because while he looks sturdy he suffers terribly when he does not hear me bustling about the house. Lord, spare him above all from this anguish. See to it that I always make noise in the house, even if I must, from time to time, break something.”

  These prayers were answered, but made for a more exhausting drill than Saint-Exupéry might have liked. His wife proved not so much capricious as unreliable: she could perform an amazing disappearing act when this was least desirable. Madeleine Goisot, an artist who met Consuelo in the Café Weber late in the evening of the February 1934 riot and exchanged addresses with her while the injured were wheeled in, saw a good deal of her in the years that followed. She served as Consuelo’s unofficial garde de coeur: Saint-Exupéry knew that if his wife went out with Madeleine Goisot she would return, something she could not otherwise be relied upon to do. Consuelo made her husband look punctual; on one occasion when she was meant to accompany him to an official reception she sent a telegram in her stead. “Can you hear the bell of your little lost lamb in the Alps? Please come and rescue me,” she wrote from Switzerland. Her husband was, by his own admission, ill at ease in love, which made it difficult for him to express himself. He claimed, however—in a letter to a lover of the 1940s—to be a fine shepherd. Consuelo gave him plenty of practice. She precipitated herself on various people in her inimitable manner, half simper, half assault, and told outrageous stories; she elaborated publicly on her husband’s habits. Her mythomania was so accomplished as to be infectious. Even Gaston Gallimard caught it. He could speak inexhaustibly on the subject of Consuelo’s eccentricities.

  While it was clear to Consuelo that the Saint-Exupérys thought her husband crazy to have married her, Madame de Saint-Exupéry in no way hesitated to welcome her daughter-in-law into the family. If anything she proved a model of patience and generosity. Simone de Saint-Exupéry may have been less accommodating, if it is fair to marshal forth her 1943 short story as evidence. In “Pèlerinages” (“Pilgrimages”), a tale rich in enchanted houses and closets of snowy linens, a young man returns with his foreign-born wife from Saigon to France. His friends had warned him against the marriage: “She’s a tough little number who will do you in, because unless she dances every night life will be a chore for her.” Having ignored their advice he is eager to introduce Denyse to the French countryside, to the family’s old housekeeper in whose ramshackle home they are to spend the night. (The family’s home has been sold, dispersing its inhabitants to the four corners of France.) Nothing could bore Denyse more; dreaming of shopping sprees and nights on the town, she behaves wretchedly, barely disguising her condescension, throwing tantrums. When her husband leaves the two women alone for a minute, Mademoiselle confides in Denyse: “He has always been so improvident, so reckless. How he kept us on our toes! Fortunately you are here now; you will watch over him. You will stop him from embarking on his adventures. He needs a kind woman to keep his closets in order, because by nature he isn’t neat; he has too much on his mind. You must run his house well.” Denyse can only laugh, while Mademoiselle goes on to vaunt the glories of the four linen closets that were her charge in the husband’s childhood home. By the end of the story the housekeeper has every reason to conclude the new wife a selfish vixen who will do her husband in.

  The state of the Saint-Exupéry marriage was well-known. The two cut each other off in midsentence, clearly taunted each other, and discussed divorce “like two kids teasing each other.” Unlike her husband, Consuelo had no objection to making herself talked about; she provided ample grist for the mill. Saint-Exupéry’s letters to her from the 1940s read as one long plea to come home on time at night and not make herself the subject of conversation. While he spoke little of his affairs of the heart, others were always happy to do so for him. In 1935 Michel Georges-Michel published an offensive novel called he baiser à Consuelo (Consuelo’s Kiss), a thinly disguised portrait of a failed marriage. Consuelo de Hautebrive is a manipulative, hysterical seductress whose looks point directly to her namesake; her husband, a former Toulouse—Casablanca pilot posted to Africa for the first half of the novel, is portrayed as a barbarian, a clod, a naïf, a big, hulking, cuckolded fool. Faced with evidence of his wife’s indiscretions during his absence he responds that a lover cannot be faulted for performing his “métier d’homme.” As for the wife: “From the moment you decide to risk your life, every day, to carry bills and shopkeeper’s records between Buenos Aires and Caputzcoa, you prefer to know that your wife is enjoying herself on this earth.… Sexual jealousy is the most monstrous sort of selfishness. Would you think of forbidding your wife to eat or sleep while you were away?”

  This kind of chatter was particularly unwelcome to a man who was so easily hurt, who placed a premium on discretion.* By the end of the 1930s Saint-Exupéry had had plenty of experience of ad hominem attacks but suffered all the same from any kind of hostility. In responding to a newspaper survey on vivisection he had written that the sacrifice of hundreds of dogs could be justified if their deaths could save the life of one child. He received an avalanche of letters and confided his distress in Pélissier: “The first three, four, five, fine. You shrug your shoulders. But when, every day, you find vicious letters in your mail, the accumulated reproach makes you miserable.” His Paris-Soir description of the Polish workers won him another 200 abusive letters, by which he was equally stung. He anguished not only over his wife’s behavior but over every one of Louise de Vilmorin’s liaisons, although—despite his best efforts—he continued to have no claim whatever on her fidelity, and although this concern reduced him to a pettiness he generally abhorred. “Put your mind on the strategy of the fight and you will not feel the other man’s punches,”
he wrote in Flight to Arras, but in the 1930s he felt every one of the punches thrown him, as if the battle were beneath him and not worthy of his pulling out his armor.

  A tumultuous home life was something to which Saint-Exupéry aspired when the world around him had seemed unnervingly calm. What he needed now—when the world was in flux and he was penniless and directionless and under fire, afflicted by what he referred to as his many “litiges” (disputes)—was a refuge from the storm. He met Madame de B, the woman who was to play this role in his life, for the first time in 1929, falling back on his usual introduction: a sheaf of papers. On this occasion it was the page proofs of Southern Mail, an ironic choice of texts given the fact that the meeting took place at the home of Louise de Vilmorin. Saint-Exupéry stood like a bashful schoolboy as his new acquaintance read. Madame de B had been married two years earlier; Saint-Exupéry was just back from Cape Juby. He was abashed a second time, when, several years later, having heard of his financial woes from Yvonne de Lestrange, his new friend sent him a check. It went uncashed, although Saint-Exupéry was made to promise that he would signal should he ever be entirely hard up. In 1934 he swallowed his pride: Consuelo had been in another auto accident, and Saint-Exupéry needed to join her immediately in Dijon. Madame de B met him at the station with the train fare and a picnic lunch; the two traveled south together late in the afternoon. In Dijon he set out in search of his wife; his benefactress changed quais and returned on the next train to Paris. She was to regret her marriage —into a prominent, wealthy, titled Catholic family—from this point on.*

  For the next ten years, to varying degrees, Madame de B—who in a lifetime of attempts to erase herself from the Saint-Exupéry record has managed to cast a longer and longer shadow, not least of all because those efforts have included writing a biography of her friend, under the pseudonym Pierre Chevrier—was to prove a formidable force in Saint-Exupéry’s life. She has been described over the years as “his sweet Egeria,” as someone “who brought him both the ‘space’ and the ‘grounding’ so crucial to him,” as Saint-Exupéry’s “guardian angel,” as “a charming and intelligent woman well-known in the literary and social life of the capital,” simply as “la blonde.” Madame de B was all of these things, stunning and golden-haired and long-legged and supremely aristocratic. She was also deeply in love with Saint-Exupéry. To her detractors she was a virago; to her admirers she was astute and quick-witted, able to accomplish anything she set her mind to. She was a childhood friend of Edmund Wilson’s fourth wife, Elena; Wilson’s daughter felt years later there may have been “some girlish rivalry about who had the biggest man of letters on her charm bracelet.” In Near the Magician, Rosalind Baker Wilson remembered that her father had a theory that “one’s wife always had a blond friend the husband didn’t like.” With Elena, “—— was it.” (Wilson’s opinion may have had something to do with the fact that the Frenchwoman informed her American friend that she had married an inelegant man.) Madame de B had gone to Beaux-Arts; she painted, and wrote fiction; she spoke flawless English; she was well-versed in literature and marvelously well-connected, as refined as Consuelo was wild, as skilled in the rules of the world as Consuelo was stunningly naïve. She was, unlike Consuelo, eminently presentable, which was important to a man who knew that a wife did not always take well to dining with her husband’s mechanic. By marriage both women were countesses; one used the title, the other played the part. Madame de B was, in short, that kind of Frenchwoman of whom Gertrude Stein’s sister was speaking when she quipped that an American wife rises wonderfully to a crisis but that a Frenchwoman sees to it that a crisis never arises.

  Consuelo, of course, took poorly to the attachment and saw that crises arose. For all her trouble her husband remained, however, devoted to her: a frail and wayward woman is what every chevalier-servant needs. (A man on whom Consuelo worked her charms years later reported that he was made to feel like her Zorro.) There are many ways to love in France, where it is sometimes necessary to specify that two people “s’aiment d’amour” and Saint-Exupéry—who had ample opportunity to do so—could never truly imagine life without his wife. He could not live with her; he fretted, and wrote her what his American agent described as “sizzling letters,” when away from her. He spoke repeatedly of his profound need to protect her; she gave him plenty of occasion to do so. He needed to exercise his sense of responsibility and somehow—in a wet cockpit on a cold night, perhaps—had learned that this should taste bitter. He was attracted—in women, at least—to the fragile and the damned, even while he at all times required a woman in his life to provide large doses of maternal solicitude. It fell to Madame de B to look after him, to counsel him, to sort out his affairs, a role for which she was supremely qualified. It fell to the rebellious Consuelo to play the part of what he called his “sorcière,” to distract him with her tall tales and her half-truths.

  And so he remained bound to both women in a kind of syzygy. “L’une le déséquilibrait,” remarked a relative, “l’autre lui rendait son équilibre.” (“One threw him off balance, the other righted him.”) Saint-Exupéry’s was not an altogether unusual arrangement—one could argue that it is in France more common than not—but this ménage attracted its share of attention because of Consuelo’s flamboyance and Madame de B’s high profile. At the end of 1935 the situation was fairly new and not yet awkward; still, it made for drama on the domestic front, the kind Saint-Exupéry liked least. It was enough to make a man—especially a broke, harried man who was not particularly invested in the future in the first place—dream of escape.

  * His cellmate was a petty thief, confounded by the arrival of Saint-Exupéry. “What? They also arrest les Légion d’Honneur!”

  * One nearly made its way into the literature. In an early manuscript of The Little Prince, a merchant hawks a futuristic machine which can be programmed to assume most functions for its user, whom it could transport anywhere. Not only could it offer a lighted cigarette, it could smoke it, too.

  * “Does a husband go from house to house crying out to his neighbors that his wife is a strumpet? Is it thus that he can preserve his honor? No, for his wife is one with his home. No, for he cannot establish his dignity against her. Let him go home to her, and there unburden himself of his anger,” he was to write in Flight to Arras.

  * Madame de B has requested that her real name not be disclosed.

  XII

  ~

  “Tayara Boum-Boum, Tayara Boum-Boum!”

  1935–1937

  Any fool can find his way, a poet alone knows how to lose it.

  STUART GILBERT

  “Aviation unites men as childbirth makes all women one,” declared André Malraux, who never learned to pilot an airplane. Late in 1935, Saint-Exupéry’s flying friends rallied—some, when they knew what was involved, against their better judgment—to bolster his sagging spirits. Mermoz took up the case of his distraught friend with General René Davet, then a high-ranking air force staff officer who had made the pilot’s acquaintance years earlier. Under no circumstances should we lend him money, warned Mermoz, whom Saint-Exupéry had already cost a small fortune; surely, however, there was another way to bail out a destitute man? The two hit on the idea of a long-distance flight; at the time the French air ministry offered two prizes for record-setting flights completed before December 31: 150,000 francs (about 80,000 1994 dollars) for the fastest Paris—Saigon, and 500,000 francs for the fastest Paris–Tananarive (Madagascar). The aircraft of choice for such a flight, known in French as a raid, was a Simoun; Saint-Exupéry already knew the route to Saigon. It seemed an obvious arrangement, an easy way to hit the jackpot.

  Saint-Exupéry’s Simoun was not configured for such a flight, and he was not back in Paris until late November. Moreover, he had been quoted—when asked several years earlier if the life of a mail pilot was not terribly monotonous—as having said that nothing was more boring than a raid. It was a gratuitous mission, undertaken when convenient and propitious for the pilot
; the mail had about it a practical urgency that lent it its flavor. All the same he embraced Mermoz’s idea and began to talk excitedly about his Paris–Saigon flight. He had little to lose. By mid-December his mission was clear: he needed to beat the record set on the sixteenth by André Japy, who had made the flight—and front-page headlines—in ninety-eight hours and fifty-two minutes in a Simoun less powerful than Saint-Exupéry’s. With a 180-horsepower engine Saint-Exupéry thought he could easily cut twenty hours off Japy’s record.

  Mermoz was to say that a raid required one to two years of preparation; Japy had made a series of preliminary flights—round-trips to Oslo, Oran, and Tunis—before his Paris—Saigon; Lindbergh spent weeks compiling the short list of emergency equipment he carried with him when he flew across the ocean in 1927. Saint-Exupéry had two weeks until the end of the year, and his preparations were casual. He spent crucial hours chasing Consuelo—who was not at all happy about his plans—around Paris. The three days at the Pont-Royal immediately preceding his departure have been described as “a combination tea party and comic opera.” Daurat and the Air Bleu mechanics saw to it that the Simoun was overhauled for the trip. Andre Prévot, who in the years that followed must have come to feel like Saint-Exupéry’s Sancho Panza, volunteered to join him. His Aéropostale colleague Jean Lucas prepared his compass readings and maps while, on the other side of the Pont-Royal room, the pilot spent as long arguing with his wife. He found the time to report to Davet’s office for regular plenary sessions—meetings he generally left with a fresh packet of Lucky Strikes, the only commodity Davet dared lend him—but in general his was a raid proposed and prepared by friends, even those, like Mermoz, who in the end thought him far too distracted to succeed. Saint-Exupéry made two crucial decisions himself: to carry no radio, so as to take on extra fuel instead, and to finance the trip partially by selling the account of it, in advance, to René Delange, the editor-in-chief of Paris-Soir’s rival, L’Intransigeant.