by Stacy Schiff
On Saturday, December 28, 1935, Lucas accompanied his friend to the Le Bourget weather bureau, where Saint-Exupéry, who had already made up his mind to leave the following morning and who was in any event running out of time, heard a mixed forecast. That evening he and Consuelo dined with Raymond Bernard and his wife in a Montmartre bistro; afterward they strolled along the street fair that lined the boulevard de Clichy. The pilot abruptly excused himself after a few minutes and headed off to visit a fortune-teller. He returned a few minutes later visibly shaken; the woman had predicted disaster. Saint-Exupéry refused to elaborate on her prophecy but steered the group to an all-night drugstore. He wanted to buy something that could be counted on to keep him from sleep in the cockpit. He was by no means rested when Lucas woke him the next morning at 4:00 a.m., having spent the latter half of Saturday evening chasing around Montmartre clubs in search of his wife, who had disappeared again. Despite Davet’s and Mermoz’s advice that he be in top physical condition for the three-day trip, he had on the morning of his departure barely slept for forty-eight hours. Ségogne drove him to Le Bourget, where Daurat, Lucas, and the Werths were to see him off. Two detours were made en route to the airfield, one to another drugstore for a thermos, a second to a bistro just opening for the day, so that the thermos could be filled with the coffee Saint-Exupéry had forgotten. At 7:01 a.m. on Sunday, December 29, Saint-Exupéry and Prévot were aloft and en route. Le Figaro carried the news of the departure—and of the fact that Saint-Exupéry was trying his hand at “l’aviation sportive“—in their lead headline.
At 2:45 a.m. on the thirtieth, searching for the lights of Cairo in a sky thick with cumulus clouds, Saint-Exupéry ploughed into a sand dune in the Libyan desert at a speed of 170 miles per hour. He had been flying blind, under the impression that the winds were behind him. As he made his descent he assumed he had already overflown the Nile; in the end he really did not know if he was closer to Libya or the Sinai. In fact the winds had been against him, and he was still some 125 miles west of the Egyptian capital. It was a mistake from which only a radio could have saved him: his instruments were of little use as Saint-Exupéry did not know either his location or the barometric pressure, by which an altimeter is regulated. The Simoun’s crash was cushioned by a field of round pebbles that acted like ball bearings under the airplane, allowing it to skate across the ground although shorn of its front landing gear. When it finally skidded to a smooth patch of sand, the Simoun stopped so abruptly that the aircraft’s contents were thrown 150 feet from the window. Anticipating an explosion Saint-Exupéry and Prévot dove out immediately. They found themselves standing side by side in the dark, unexpectedly alive. “I was sure he was going to keel over any minute and split open from head to navel before my eyes,” wrote the pilot of Prévot, who could complain only of having bruised his knee in the leap from the Simoun. It was not to matter much but—one-third of the way to Saigon—Saint-Exupéry had already shaved two hours off Japy’s record.
“Our situation was hardly ideal,” admitted the pilot later in his official report. Unsure of their whereabouts the two men spent what remained of the evening in the cockpit, doubtless privately taking inventory of their rations, which consisted of a thermos of very sweet coffee, some chocolate, and a few crackers.* In the morning they set out to the north, but after a walk of some thirty miles encountered nothing but sand. The second day they ventured west, where Saint-Exupéry was certain Cairo lay. A “vague foreboding” stopped him in his tracks, however. Reason dictated that Cairo lay to the west, but his feet would only take him east. Later he realized that he must on this count, as on many others, have been thinking of Guillaumet in the Andes, and that “in a confused way the east had become for me the direction of life.” In fact a walk west would have been a walk toward nothingness; once again the pilot’s instincts served him well. Years later Prévot was asked why he had so willingly followed Saint-Exupéry in the desert. “Oh, because of that,” responded the mechanic, touching a finger to his nose. “Saint-Exupéry, he always knows the way!” The second day’s walking proved futile, however, and the two spent a miserably dry New Year’s Eve. Saint-Exupéry was haunted by the vision of Consuelo’s eyes peering out at him from under the brim of her hat, “like a scream for help, like the flares of a sinking ship.” (The sturdy Prévot suffered from similar concerns. On the second day he began to weep. “Do you think it’s me I’m bawling about?” he asked Saint-Exupéry, when the pilot tried to console him.) As Guillaumet had been, Saint-Exupéry was shamed by the vision of his wife. He was far too impractical to think in terms of insurance payments, however. Just after his rescue he wrote his mother that he had fought tooth and nail to survive because he knew Consuelo needed him; he was prepared to move mountains in the name of duty.
On the third day, parched, discouraged, and ultimately delirious, having seen no sign of a rescue plane, the two set out toward the northeast, to walk until they could do so no longer. They took with them the Simoun’s parachutes, with which they hoped they might collect the morning dew. Probably again with Guillaumet in mind, Saint-Exupéry scrawled his adieu on the side of the fuselage. He left the other side to Prévot, who was concise: “I ask my wife’s forgiveness for whatever hurt I have caused her.” In the sand the two men stamped out in thirty-foot-high letters: “WE HAVE HEADED NORTHEAST. SOS.”
On January 1, when Parisian newspaper vendors’ cries alerted the city to Saint-Exupéry’s disappearance, a small group had already assembled around Consuelo at the Hôotel Pont-Royal. A sort of command center was set up here, much to the dismay of the hotel’s telephone operator, who nearly went mad in the hours that followed. At all times eight to ten of Saint-Exupéry’s friends and relatives could be found in the Pont-Royal lobby; Madame de Saint-Exupéry arrived to be at her daughter-in-law’s side on the first; Madeleine Goisot was on hand, requested by the Ségognes to bunk in with the frazzled Consuelo; Yvonne de Lestrange, Werth, Gallimard, Daurat, Kessel, Fleury, Lucas, Fargue, Jeanson, and a host of other friends, many of whom now met for the first time, kept up the vigil. A number of journalists installed themselves at the hotel; café waiters, hotel porters, passersby stuck their heads in to make solemn inquiries. Few of the acquaintances with whom Saint-Exupéry had shared a café table in the preceding years failed to put in an appearance. Among them his friends divided the tasks of the watch. Lucas served as official liaison with Air France; Ségogne took it upon himself to hound the Quai d’Orsay, which in his estimation was making neither a concerned nor a concerted effort to locate Saint-Exupéry. He paid a call on the minister of foreign affairs himself—who happened at the time to be Pierre Laval, also the prime minister—to ask that the rescue effort be given a little more attention. RAF planes from Iraq, French planes from Damascus, Italian and Egyptian aircraft were at one point or another dispatched to comb the desert but Saint-Exupéry, who customarily took up so much room and created such a stir around him, had disappeared into thin air. It did not help that two men walking in the desert are as good as invisible, or that no one knew exactly where to begin to search. Generally it was assumed that the Frenchmen had been carried north by the wind, to Palestine.
No one could have felt as frustrated by this turn of events than Daurat, who had doubted that Saint-Exupéry could succeed in his raid but had done so much to ensure that he would. He had more experience in the waiting game than anyone else, however, and hid his concern well. At one point a young woman sidled up to him in the Pont-Royal lobby and asked wide-eyed if Saint-Exupéry would be found. “Ah, Saint-Exupéry, he’s gotten himself into a hell of a mess [il s’est foutu dans un épouvantable merdier] and, as usual, at the last minute he’ll get out of it,” replied Daurat. When Fleury telephoned him with the same question he was equally sanguine but more elegant: “Have no fear, he is a man of great battles. Of course he’ll make it. I’ve seen him disarmed only by the little things, by pettiness, stupidity.” Consuelo meanwhile discovered that she had never been better suited to being an aviator�
��s wife than she was now, the near-widow of a celebrity flyer. There was ample reason for melodramatics, and she was, or appeared, at her wit’s end. One of Saint-Exupéry’s editors remembered her publicly refusing all food while privately tucking into a plate of sauerkraut hidden under a carpet. She offended some of his friends, dramatically offering to “carry the torch” [“reprendre le flambeau“] now that her husband was gone. When she sat down in a café the day after his departure, spread a map before her, and nervously began to talk to the person at the next table about the raid, she made sure that that person happened to be a Figaro reporter. She paid frequent visits to Notre-Dame-des-Victoires, a small church on the place des Petits-Pères, where she claimed to know from her prayers that her husband had been found. Her confidence was reinforced on Thursday, January 2, by Madame Luce Vidi, eminent clairvoyant. Saint-Exupéry’s overcoat in hand, Madame Vidi swore that the pilot was alive and well, having been rescued by a caravan. Consuelo fainted at the news, leaving Madame Vidi’s in such a state that she did so without the coat. The proprietor of Lipp described a particularly memorable entrance Consuelo made that week in the brasserie: “Held up by two friends, bathed in tears, she was grief personified. Then she sat down calmly to await condolences.” In Agay, Gabrielle and her family kept up a different kind of vigil, praying ceaselessly, daring to hope for what they knew full well would be a miracle.
Saint-Exupéry’s misadventure would sell books; now it sold newspapers. His departure had been front-page news in the popular press, as had all the raids of the time and aviation news in general. Paris–Saigon and Paris–Tananarive efforts regularly found their way to the front page; Christmas week Paris-Soir ran a series called “The Glorious and Dramatic Life of Charles Lindbergh.” If a record-breaking flight boosted circulation a lost aviator was even better; between the first, when Saint-Exupéry was reported missing somewhere east of Benghazi, and January 3, much news was generated by a complete absence of news. About the most that could be said was that a search effort was under way. Finally on the second, late in the evening, Lucas was called to the telephone at the Pont-Royal. The air ministry was on the line. At the same time it was announced that Consuelo was wanted on the telephone—by Monsieur de Saint-Exupéry, calling from Cairo. The lobby exploded with joy. Consuelo may have fainted for the second time that evening; if she actually did so she first let out a piercing shriek that Saint-Exupéry was to say would ring forever in his ears. He asked his wife for what all record-setting aviators, successful or not, need on landing: a change of shirt. Off went the Pont-Royal group to celebrate chez Lipp, then at a Saint-Germain apartment, where the singing kept the neighbors up until about 5:00 a.m. Gide, who had been worried sick about his protégé, woke the rue Vaneau a little later with the good news. At a more respectable hour he reported to the Pont-Royal, where Consuelo was no longer receiving. Exhausted from the previous evening’s revel, she had taken a sleeping pill and had allowed herself to be disturbed only once, by a second call from her husband. The other Madame de Saint-Exupéry was very much up and about. Dressed discreetly in a long black dress, she fended off a reporter’s questions, preferring that he speak later with her daughter-in-law. She had spent the morning running errands for her son.
~
For a man who had often assured his mother that the world was small it must have seemed for three days supremely vast. Seventy hours after their departure from Paris Saint-Exupéry and Prévot should have been in Saigon; instead, they were tramping northeast through the rolling dunes of the Libyan desert. They had a compass, but it was of no use as they were entirely disoriented. Their condition had not been improved by a freezing night in the open air, followed by a dewless morning; their spirits were not improved by the search planes that overflew them regularly without seeing them. By the fourth day, like men “canoeing in mid-ocean,” they were so exhausted that they advanced only by steps of 600 yards. They had no saliva, no strength, no emotion. Years later Saint-Exupéry was asked if he had been afraid, lost in a desert three times bigger than France. “After three days of walking under a hot sun, you no longer answer to courage but to mirages.… You are no longer capable of emotion. Emotions require humidity!” he responded. His throat had contracted; his tongue felt like plaster of paris; he did not dare part his lips for fear he would be unable to retract his tongue; bright spots flickered before his eyes; he was hallucinating. Around him the landscape began to change, however, and scrubby vegetation began to appear. At last the two men stumbled upon human footprints. Encouraged by “that caravan swaying somewhere in the desert, heavy with its cargo of treasure,” the pilot forged on. Then suddenly he and Prévot had the same hallucination: a Bedouin on camelback appeared from behind a dune, leading a caravan. Summoning all of his strength and all of his knowledge of Arabic, Saint-Exupéry rushed at the men squawking, “Tayara boum-boum! Tayara boum-boum!” (“Airplane fall! Airplane fall!”) The Bedouins understood the essential; before them were two men who could not take three steps without falling on their faces. Immediately they produced a basin of fresh water, into which Saint-Exupéry and Prévot—flat on their stomachs in the sand—plunged their faces “like young calves” and with an ardor they would later regret. Hoisting the Frenchmen onto a camel, the Bedouins began to lead them back to civilization. The arrangement lasted only for about nine miles, as the pilot and his mechanic proved too weak to hold to their mounts.
Twelve miles away, Madame Raccaud was getting her children ready for bed at Wadi Natroun when two Bedouins arrived at her door with an urgent message for her husband, the Swiss director of the Egyptian Salt & Soda Company, Ltd. “Could you pay my guide three guineas,” it read,
I have no local currency. After five [sic] days of walking in the desert with hardly a drop of water, my mechanic and I have just arrived at a small oasis. We are being brought to your home by camel but no longer have the strength to bear this form of transport. May we count on your great indulgence and ask you to come fetch us as soon as possible by car or boat. Our guide will explain to you where we are. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. We thank you in advance.
Madame Raccaud, whose husband was in Alexandria, was confused. She knew who Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was, and she knew he had been in Cairo the previous month. It made no sense that he was back again; Wadi Natroun being somewhat off the beaten track, she had not yet heard of the attempted raid. (Had she turned over the paper in her hand she would have found a clue: a neatly typed list of descriptions of Middle Eastern landing strips.) And what in the world did the celebrated writer want with a boat, miles from water? She nonetheless sent the guide off with a company truck, which returned at 6:00 p.m. with the two Frenchmen. It was not much easier to understand their situation once Saint-Exupéry and Prévot began to explain it: in a state of nervous exhaustion, they got tangled up in their accounts, leaping around in time and interrupting each other. In the middle of this jumbled narration Monsieur Raccaud returned. He had in his hands the papers announcing that the aviators had been lost and was rather surprised to open the door of his home to find them seated in his living room, smoking cigarettes. As he walked in he heard Saint-Exupéry saying to his wife, “When you have nothing left to hope for, it is easy to die!” Raccaud proposed that the aviators’ story be interrupted for tea and a bite to eat. “Yes, tea—and whiskey,” suggested Saint-Exupéry. “We suffered such terrible thirst in the desert.”
At 8:00 o’clock Raccaud set off with the two men in his car for Cairo, inviting along an armed Bedouin as an escort. In its way the trip must have seemed to Saint-Exupéry like a tribute to the olden days: four miles from the Pyramids, Raccaud ran out of gas. For this reason it was not until much later that the pilot was able, from a Giza hotel, fifteen miles outside of Cairo, to get to a telephone. His first call, to the French minister in Cairo, was met with some skepticism. Pierre de Witasse had been in bed for some time; when he appeared in his office to take the call an aide warned him, “Don’t forget, sir, that it is past midnight, and the call h
as come from a bar.” Witasse agreed to call the Air Ministry on the pilot’s behalf; Saint-Exupéry appears to have waited until his arrival in Cairo to make the remainder of his calls. Raccaud deposited the aviators on the steps of the Hotel Continental and disappeared for a few minutes, presumably to park the car. In doing so he left the Frenchmen to one of the greatest labors of their odyssey: getting past the Continental’s porter. He took one look at their tattered clothes, their unshaven faces, and announced that the hotel did not lodge beggars. Evidently at this moment a procession of spectacularly well-dressed conference-goers happened on the scene. An international surgical congress was under way in Cairo, and the representatives of twenty countries—in white tie and dripping with medals—were making their way from a banquet at the Faculté de Médecine to the city’s red light district. The ruckus in front of the hotel on the Place de l’Opéra caught their attention; slumped on the steps, at the mercy of the porter, were what appeared to be two drunks. “Get lost, I want a room, I am Saint-Ex,” the heavier one was saying, over and over.
