by Stacy Schiff
Within minutes Saint-Exupéry had not only a room, a bath, and a whiskey, but a team of the world’s most eminent surgeons leaning over his naked body, listening to his heartbeat, monitoring his pulse, examining his eyes. (The record yields no clue as to the attentions Prévot may or may not have received at the same time, apart from the glass of champagne served him in the hotel lobby. He appeared generally unwilling to speak to reporters, deferring to Saint-Exupéry, perhaps more wed to the advice Daurat had years before given the Aéropostale pilots about seeing their names in newspapers. For this he paid the price: one of the greatest casualties of the Libya crash would be Prévot’s rather ordinary name, which would rarely be spelled the same way twice and never correctly.) Raccaud returned after a few minutes and was able to clear up the confusion over how Saint-Exupéry had crawled out of the desert and, incognito, onto the steps of the Hotel Continental, an explanation that others would later choose to ignore. Gabriel Dardaud, L’Intransigeant’s reporter who observed these first moments at the hotel, swiftly called the news of the rescue in to the paper. He was surprised to hear that no one wanted his account of the misadventure, Saint-Exupéry being under exclusive contract to the newspaper himself. The flyer was by no means disposed to write a piece that evening, however, and Dardaud left him to sleep. Consequently Paris-Soir became the first paper to carry the news of the rescue and an interview with the pilot in a special edition published on January 3. That morning toward eleven Dardaud found Saint-Exupéry on the terrace of the hotel. As he was asked to do he bluntly reminded the aviator of his commitment to the paper, which had already advanced him the bulk of his payment for the raid pieces. “A large smile illuminated the face of my interlocutor. ‘Tell them for me that the accident was not included in our agreement.” ’
After eighty-seven hours in the desert Saint-Exupéry returned quickly to the world of men. An army of reporters called on him in the morning; they found him refreshed and lighthearted, emotional only when talking about how sick with worry his wife must have been. His wardrobe alone showed signs of distress. His clothes having been frayed in the trek, he began the interviews in a bathrobe and finished them in a shirt the concierge had bought for him, without tie or cuff links. Otherwise he was in fine form, eighteen pounds lighter than he had been, more garrulous than usual, no doubt feeling for once that earthly impositions were all of them, in the scheme of things, pleasures. He received a flurry of telegrams, including one from his family that touched him deeply: “ARE SO HAPPY.” (He had sent one of his own: “SAFE AND SOUND SEND ALL MY LOVE.”) He was inundated by notes, letters, calling cards. He had a shave and a haircut, talking with a reporter while he did so. He comported himself like a man reprieved. Evidently Witasse called on him in the morning and found three bottles lined up on the floor of his room, one of champagne, one of whiskey, one of Vichy water. Saint-Exupéry explained that they represented the three stages of a man’s life, the last being, of course, the age of reason. “A few hours’ sleep restored all of his lucidity,” reported the Figaro’s correspondent. Dardaud, who watched as Saint-Exupéry tucked into a hearty breakfast, found this to be true. Breakfasts in the desert were exorbitantly priced, remarked the aviator gaily as he ate; to gather a tiny quantity of dew he had had to sacrifice a 6,200-franc parachute. There was about him no trace of embarrassment or failure, as there was in the press mainly wild praise for his heroism. (Marseille-Matin went so far as to contrast the purity of his feat with the elaborate machinations of France’s elected officials.) He talked with reporters of his desire to make a second attempt at the trip. He responded to a letter from his mother: “I cried reading your brief note, so full of meaning, because I had called to you in the desert. I was in a rage against all men because of their absence, their silence, and I called for my mother.… It is a little for Consuelo that I came back, but it is by you, Maman, that I was brought back.” The order Witasse had placed with a Cairo funeral parlor at the instruction of the Quai d’Orsay for two lead-lined coffins was canceled.
Saint-Exupéry drank a great number of toasts, doubtless remembering the words of Joseph Le Brix, who, rescued from the desert, swore that in his delirium he had seen parade before his eyes every frosted beer glass he had refused in his life. Late that morning he did so with seven or eight compatriots, one of whom was a young Cairo-based engineer who, as a reserve air force officer, followed French aviation news closely. Paul Barthe-Dejean arrived at the Continental on the third with his copy of Vol de nuit, which Saint-Exupéry giddily inscribed. He drew a little man, lounging on the book’s title. Below the figure he began, then crossed out, what was clearly to be an earnest inscription. Over it he scrawled: “I started a sentence I can’t get out of. Rather than exhausting myself on grandiose pronouncements I prefer to admit that I have had too much to drink. But I swear that I behaved perfectly in the desert.” Barthe-Dejean invited his new friend and a few others to his parents’ Cairo home, where the family’s Nubian cook prepared a lavish lunch, washed down, to Saint-Exupéry’s delight, with champagne. He was enough revived to finish off the meal with a flurry of card tricks.
On the seventh an expedition of three cars set out at 6:00 a.m. for Wadi Natroun, four hours west of Cairo, to visit the remains of the Simoun. Saint-Exupéry and the Renault insurance adjusters were followed by two cars of friends and journalists; Prévot, who had been at work on the airplane since the third, had preceded them to the site. Not having seen each other for several days, the pilot and his mechanic shook hands with obvious emotion. Barthe-Dejean was struck by the sight of the fuselage, stripped of its wings, its propeller, the engine cowling, the windows, and a door, lying flat on its belly in the sand. Saint-Exupéry asked the group to keep its distance and discreetly erased his premature farewell to the world. Over the wreckage he then delivered a miniature press conference, explaining his attempts to find Cairo, all of them based on the hypothesis that he had already overflown the Nile. The insurance experts thought the wreckage best deserted but the pilot insisted that an attempt be made to salvage the parts of the unfortunate airplane. Several morsels were handed out as souvenirs; over the next two weeks the Raccauds’ home became the base of operations as Prévot set about disassembling the rest of the Simoun. In a handcart of Raccaud’s design its remains were transported to Alexandria and shipped back to France, an effort Saint-Exupéry would describe later as a “tour de force.” The debris was sold to a Valence businessman in 1938.
Only on the eighteenth, having written the better part of his six articles for L’Intransigeant in one of the most productive literary sprints of his life, did Saint-Exupéry himself set sail from Alexandria in an Egyptian boat, the Kawsar. He had for over a week entirely dominated the news: toward January 9 he had been eased off the front page by Lindbergh’s arrival in Europe and by the Hauptmann trial, by a new record-setting flight by Japy, and, on the fifteenth, by word of Howard Hughes’s trans-American flight in a Northrop Gamma, made in nine hours and twenty-seven minutes. Reporters hungered for every detail of the accident, searching out Prévot’s family (a native of Picardy, he turned out to be the son of a mechanic), even managing a few minutes with the Bedouins to whom the Frenchmen owed their lives. It was no secret that Saint-Exupéry had taken off in haste; still, he was hailed as an authentic hero, a portrait of courage, a man with a claim on what La Bruyère termed “la véritable grandeur.” There were of course occasional dissenters: the aviation journal Les Ailes wrote up the accident with some incredulity, implying that no pilot could be both so careless and so lucky to have survived such carelessness. Gallimard meanwhile profited from the headlines, running ads for Vol de nuit and Courrier Sud, along with their author’s photo. All of this coverage would pale in comparison to Saint-Exupéry’s own account of the desert, which began to run in L’Intransigeant under the title “Prison de Sable” on the thirtieth.
Leaving Prévot behind, Saint-Exupéry arrived in Marseilles, where he was greeted by his wife, his mother, his sister, and a horde of reporters,
on January 21. As the Kawsar slowly steamed into port toward noon that day, the pilot waved to the crowd from the boat’s promenade deck. In tears, Consuelo cried out, “Finally, you’ve come!” Everyone plied him with questions at once; Saint-Exupéry, by now more used to the attention, read from a prepared statement into a microphone, Consuelo at his side. Afterward, in a smoking room of the Kawsar, a reception was held in his honor; late in the afternoon he was feted by the Aéro-Club de Provence. Copies of Vol de nuit and Courrier Sud surfaced everywhere and were dutifully autographed.
In Paris the celebrations continued around Saint-Germain. The Lipp proprietor did not easily forget the welcome home thrown in his establishment. Word of Saint-Exupéry’s return traveled quickly around the neighborhood, and his friends rushed to Lipp to drink to his health. The place was mobbed; it was understood that each of the revelers would pay his share on leaving. When the party broke up at 3:00 a.m. not a single one of the pilot’s euphoric friends remembered to settle his bill. Saint-Exupéry himself ate like a man who had been marooned in the desert for three days, whipping up a storm of boudin, steak tartare, aïoli, and chocolate. He was unapologetic about his indulgences, explaining to Fargue: “I suffered such thirst that my mechanic and I swore that for the rest of our lives we would never turn down a drink.” There were, all the same, certain constraints. The flier returned to a hero’s welcome but with an empty purse; the trip that should have relined the coffers ended up costing him money. Several days after his return he called Jeanson to ask if his friend might meet him at the Deux-Magots. He had a great favor to ask him. Jeanson ran to the café, where Saint-Exupéry explained that he was afraid to go back to the rue de Chanaleilles alone. He owed several months’ back rent, and thought if the concierge saw him with company she might refrain from comment. He had not yet dared to venture back to the apartment. Jeanson told him he was out of his mind; he had, after all, been in every newspaper for the last weeks. “She’s going to throw her arms around you, kiss you, and offer you a drink, your concierge!” “Possible,” replied Saint-Exupéry, “but come with me anyway, you never know.” Jeanson’s prediction proved correct, reinforcing Daurat’s claim that the pilot was a man undone only by the little things. Later he asked Saint-Exupéry why he had chosen him for this delicate mission. Saint-Exupéry admitted that he could not have spoken of his embarrassment to many people. There was another reason, too: “If I had appealed to another friend he might have lent me money, while you—for all your goodwill—could not have,” he told Jeanson.
~
The evening after the return to Paris, the Saint-Exupérys joined the Bernards for a late dinner in the same Montmartre bistro they had frequented the night before the attempted raid. The meal was barely over when the pilot pulled a writing pad from his inside coat pocket. He spent a moment shuffling pages, then began to read his story of the accident and his miraculous resurrection. Nothing about the desert ordeal could have prepared anyone for the lush poetry of his account of it, which these three were probably the first to hear. Consuelo burst instantly into tears. Bernard thought these the most beautiful of his friend’s pages, a case it remains easy to argue. General Davet and Jean-Gérard Fleury were treated to an account at about the same time, in the deserted basement of a Champs-Élysées café. They proved equally impressed. When the six pieces appeared in L’Intransigeant between January 30 and February 4, they created a sensation: Never would Saint-Exupéry’s celebrity stock rise so high in France save, perhaps, when these pages reappeared as the longest section of Terre des hommes in a somewhat condensed form. (They are barely reworked in the English edition, published as Wind, Sand and Stars.) He had set off for Saigon for the most prosaic of reasons; from his failure to reach Indochina he had emerged a hero, as odd a twist, surely, as was his having been cast from the bosom of the Aéropostale family for having publicly glorified the enterprise. His mail in the following months was heavy, enough so that he initially hired Madeleine Goisot as a secretary, then allowed a friend to fix him up with a professional. The sober Mademoiselle Zaclav saw to his constant and demanding correspondence of the next months: Could Saint-Exupéry attend the opening of Anne-Marie in Dijon? In Nancy? A viewing of Vol de nuit at the Fédération Aéronautique de France? A gala in Limoges? Could he lecture at any number of provincial aeroclubs?
Luminaries do not always make attractive tenants, and the Saint-Exupérys’ landlord proved more interested in seeing his rent paid on time than in sheltering a hero of France and his eccentric wife. The rue de Chanaleilles lease was rescinded on February 9. The couple’s few pieces of furniture—officially now government property in lieu of back taxes—stayed until later in the month, when they were removed to a storage depot. Saint-Exupéry moved temporarily to the Hôotel Lutétia, next door to the Pont-Royal; even before her frenzied January stay at the Pont-Royal, Consuelo had been settled in a modest apartment on the rue Froidevaux, across from the Montparnasse cemetery, where the air was cleaner than elsewhere in Paris. Her husband’s move made sense in terms of the couple’s nomadic lifestyle—he spent part of February in the south, where he did some writing, and continued to travel throughout the year—but did little to ease the strain on their finances. He was as ever forced to go to unhappy lengths to pay the rent, although in 1936 these efforts did not take him as far afield as Libya. (The lesson of that experience seems to have been that such concerns were truly immaterial: not all of the hotel bills of these years were paid.) He groused about his finances, but charmingly so. At the time it was said that 200 families controlled all of France’s wealth. Pondering his frayed cuffs at the Lutétia one day, Saint-Exupéry told Françoise Giroud, then the young script girl on the screen adaptation of Courrier Sud, that one would be well advised to find a way to join one of these families for eight days, just long enough to “refresh one’s wardrobe.” A few years later Prévot alerted the pilot to the fact that he had found a used Simoun for sale for 300,000 francs. “I am going to write him that he would have been better advised to have found the 300,000 francs; I would have taken it upon myself to find the Simoun,” Saint-Exupéry informed Pélissier.
Fundamentally he was too much a malcontent to enjoy any sustained euphoria at being alive and back in Paris, a city incapacitated in the spring of 1936 by labor strikes of all kinds. Artistically he found himself caught up in a vicious cycle. He was not in a position to turn down journalistic or screenwriting assignments that came his way and took these on with some bitterness. “I feel like a prisoner, spending his time weaving baskets, when I could be so much more useful, so much better off elsewhere,” he wrote Madame de B late in the year. He found such work provided no satisfaction whatsoever; each opportunity to write a screenplay provided not only one less opportunity to write a book, but one more to write a screenplay. There was little consolation in this. Nor was any forthcoming from his wife, more invested in her husband’s celebrity than in his career. Early in March Émile Raccaud wrote that a tiny red airplane had overflown Wadi Natroun and had made him think of Saint-Exupéry. He enclosed with his letter photos taken during the towing of the Simoun. Saint-Exupéry wrote back cordially on the twentieth, sending on a small compass as a sign of his continuing gratitude. He had not forgotten the warm welcome he had received. “Furthermore, I already miss Wadi Natroun and its peace,” he wrote Raccaud. “Here the world seems to be less of a desert, but is much more of one.”
Each time a new assignment came his way, Saint-Exupéry managed to spend the income straight away. “Money burned a hole in his pocket,” said Consuelo openly of her husband; he made no public observations regarding her habits. Early in the year he was approached about a screen adaptation of his first novel; months later Jeanson directed another film project his way; when the Spanish Civil War broke out in July he was asked by L’Intransigeant for a series of articles. He said yes to all of these projects because he was in debt and felt he had to: by early summer he and Consuelo were decorating a lavish duplex in a new Art Déco building on the place Va
uban—an apartment with a rent three times that of the rue de Chanaleilles—into which the couple moved in July. Saint-Exupéry laid claim to the lower floor and Consuelo to the upper, an arrangement that suited their increasingly parallel lives better than had any previous abode; a conciliatory Consuelo told her husband she was granting him “a spousal holiday.” Each had a separate telephone. The apartment overlooked the Esplanade des Invalides and beyond it the Right Bank; on its terrace Saint-Exupéry occasionally camped out this summer. A distinguished-looking Russian émigré butler named Boris lorded over the home, on which the Saint-Exupérys did a great deal of work. Mirrors went up. Carpets went down. Walls were moved, cabinets hung, bookcases installed. The apartment was entirely painted. All of this appears to have been done under the supervision of an architect-decorator, hired in May. The furniture, however, was spare and, charitably speaking, eclectic; much of it had been donated by friends. The living room was furnished with green lawn chairs; a wooden plank laid over two horses served as a desk; the bookshelves were finished but their shelves never installed, leaving the writer’s library in a jumble. The place Vauban represented Saint-Exupéry’s only affair with bourgeois living, a half-successful arrangement that lasted just over two years. It was to be one of the great ironies of his life that—a native of the most stubbornly bourgeois of France’s cities—he never quite mastered this art.
