by Stacy Schiff
His immediate project in the spring of 1936—when amid much excitement the Front Populaire came to power—was the adaptation of Courrier Sud for the screen. Françoise Giroud, today one of France’s better-known journalists and writers, worked with him daily on the project, typing out a number of versions of the screenplay in his room at the Lutétia. At the end of the afternoon the two would head off to the Deux-Magots or to the Café de Flore for a drink, often moving on to a neighborhood bistro for dinner. Saint-Exupéry was clearly at ease with Giroud, whose sex and age recommended her to him (she was eighteen at the time); he wrote her fantastic prose poems, made her drawings, shared the best of his musical repertoire, and generally unloaded his trunk of marvels. She remembered him as eternally broke, weighed down by debts but not belongings. He turned into her guardian angel when, in the fall, director Pierre Billon began to film Courrier Sud in southern Morocco. There was some question as to whether or not Giroud should be allowed to accompany thirty men into the desert for a shoot that was to last three weeks. She was on the verge of being replaced by a script boy when the writer gallantly saved the day: “Let her go,” he declared. “She will be my ward.” At the Hôotel Mogador he insisted that Giroud’s room be adjacent to his, the better for him to defend her virtue.
Saint-Exupéry played the role of knight in shining armor better than that of beleaguered husband. Giroud knew him in 1936, as did many people, to be “crucified by his wife, whom he loved and who was unfaithful to him.” While he had once written Consuelo letters when they were in the same room he now corresponded with her of necessity. In his early communications he sounded—stung by her caprices, by the missed engagements, the late nights out—like a disappointed parent. (“I like to be proud of you”; “Behave so that I can always, always trust you.”) Now he wrote with the fury and anguish of a lover spurned. (“Oh, these sleepless nights spent waiting up for you.… Inside I am the same young man who loved you so—but you are the same Consuelo who deserts our home.”) He was by no means blameless himself, but he knew how the game was played and was at least discreet about his diversions. After years that should have taught him better he continued to hope that some of this prudence would wear off on his wife, a woman whom he had married for her vivacity and unconventionality, who might appear swaddled in floor-length mink in July, who made a noisy entrance as the Countess de Saint-Exupéry. In a particularly patient mood he pleaded with her, after she had been less than circumspect in her remarks:
I beg you one day to understand true dignity and true nobility, which is not to speak of such things. You are a little châtelaine now, you must forgo the language and reactions of a young girl. They must say of you, ‘How dignified and proper that little Consuelo is. What admirable reserve. She had many faults but she has changed so much!’ And not what they are bound to say when you flaunt our intimate problems. I want to protect you, but first you must help me protect you from yourself. Forgive me for having to say this once again, but I so much want you to become what you should be: a blushing, poetic young woman, adorable and discreet, and not a noisy muse for Surrealist brasseries.
Neither of the Saint-Exupérys could have been easy to live with, and Consuelo suffered equally at her husband’s hands. She was as proud and jealous as she was inconstant, and was hurt that her husband’s friends did not have much patience for her. She complained to one—who had been assigned to keep an eye on her—about the bad rhythms to which she and Saint-Exupéry were prey. Even as she pursued her own interests she felt humiliated by her husband’s increasingly official liaison. She did not hesitate to attack Madame de B publicly, causing her enough embarrassment that family members wrote to ask that Madame de B do her best to tone things down. Consuelo may or may not have known her husband’s sentimental life was messier still, at least on paper: he had not relinquished his fascination with Louise de Vilmorin, on whom he doted from afar. In the mid-1950s he continued to write his ex-fiancée tenderly of his devotion: “Whisper to yourself, very softly, as you fall asleep tonight, that someone loves you.”
Late in 1936 Consuelo called a lawyer who had been recommended to her by a sculptor friend. He was on his way to Vichy for a cure; she told him her business could not wait and volunteered to meet him there. In the lobby of his hotel she went straight to the point: she wanted a divorce. “Do you have a lover?” asked the lawyer. “No,” replied Consuelo. “Do you have money?” he asked. “No,” answered Consuelo. “Do you intend to remarry?” Once again Consuelo answered in the negative. “Then why do you want a divorce?” asked the pragmatic lawyer. “May I make a telephone call?” responded Consuelo, excusing herself. Shortly she was overheard saying, “Don’t worry, I’m not divorcing you.” Saint-Exupéry, too, considered divorce but felt hampered by his background; he admitted as well—later, to another woman—that the idea of remarriage tore him apart. Preferring, it seemed, his ideals to the reality of his situation, unable to relinquish the sense that he was above all responsible for his wayward wife, he endured the marriage in much the same way as did she. The strategy suited him; he left town often.
In late May and early June Saint-Exupéry made a short trip to Germany and Romania, either as the pilot of a borrowed airplane or as a passenger. In July 1936, expecting to acquire a new Simoun with the insurance collected after the Libyan crash, he applied for permission to overfly Russia in a Paris—Tokyo raid. (The permission was, notwithstanding the Franco-Soviet pact of the previous year, denied.) On August 10, L’Intransigeant announced on its front page that he had left in the company plane for Rarcelona. Two days later the first of his five articles, on Barcelona and the Lérida front, appeared. The Spanish pieces ring with Saint-Exupéry’s usual themes—seen from either side the war seemed senseless to him; he was horrified by the loss of respect for the individual demonstrated by both Loyalists and Rebels; he abhorred the idea of a man being reduced to his political affiliation—but are generally uninspired. The exception was his account of having made the rounds with Pépin, a French Socialist and anti-Church worker who had for some reason taken it upon himself to negotiate with the revolutionaries for the release of French monks. When he succeeded in his mission he hurled insults at the ex-prisoners for whom he had just risked his life; in response the priests threw their arms around their savior, crying with joy. The whole seemed to Saint-Exupéry a perfect demonstration of the absurdity of the situation.
He must have been happy to be back in Paris, where a new red Simoun—identical to the first, save that it was more powerful and already outfitted for a raid, its two back seats having been torn out to make room for additional fuel—awaited him. He flew when he could at Le Bourget, usually in the late afternoons, often inviting a friend along for the ride. This was not often enough for his tastes, however; his writing assignments still claimed the bulk of his attention. The adaptation of Courrier Sud continued apace, which meant that at least provisionally the distractions of Paris were best left behind. The film’s producer installed a group including Saint-Exupéry and Pierre Billon, in a small inn overlooking the Seine, a mile or so north of Fontainebleau. It seemed to him that a bit of calm would do the project good. Unfortunately for Pan Ciné the distractions of Paris sought out the film’s writer. Billon remembered that one after another Saint-Exupéry’s friends drove out to surprise him, guaranteeing long evenings of electrifying conversation and impossible-seeming card tricks. At the same time Saint-Exupéry’s attention was diverted by the last of his Barcelona pieces. Predictably, he knocked on Billon’s door one morning at 2:00 a.m. to read an article he had just finished. He proved no less hungry for approbation as his literary reputation grew than he had as a neophyte: Jeanson recalled a similar incident the following year, after a second Spain reportage, when Saint-Exupéry forced him away from the lunch table and thrust into his hands the proofs of a Paris-Soir article. A messenger was due to take them back to the paper in minutes; Saint-Exupéry insisted that Jeanson look them over immediately. “Do you think it’s readable?” he badge
red his friend. “Is it worth publishing?” (Jeanson hardly felt himself worthy of such questions and chose to evade them. “Oui, Monsieur Molière,” he answered, after a quick review. “Merci, Monsieur Boileau,” replied Saint-Exupéry.) Billon good-humoredly chauffeured Saint-Exupéry and his 1936 pieces to L’Intransigeant’s offices, trips that, naturally, did little to speed the work on Courrier Sud. The director finally admitted his concern on one such excursion, when the writer asked if they might pass by his tailor’s on the rue des Pyramides while in town. “You’ll see,” he promised, “I’ll be out in two minutes.” Billon obliged. Saint-Exupéry raced into the shop, waved his jacket at the tailor, cried, “Hello! The same!” and was back at the director’s side in seconds. “That took no time!” he exclaimed as they drove off.
Work on the dialogue and cutting of Courrier Sud continued in October in Paris, where nearly every day toward four Saint-Exupéry dragged Billon to Le Bourget for a spin in his Simoun. Meanwhile Jeanson had involved Saint-Exupéry in a project with his London-based friend Alexander Korda, who was planning the first in what was to be a series of films on the history of aviation. Saint-Exupéry was thrilled by the idea and probably that fall traveled to London with Jeanson to consult on the project. The two men happily settled into a luxurious suite at the Savoy but were discouraged when it turned out that filming had already begun and that the results were not much to their tastes. An English-speaking Blériot with a gluedon mustache was more than the two Frenchmen could stomach; while they were happy to live in the lap of luxury at Korda’s expense, they found themselves quickly out of ideas. During this trip Jeanson introduced his friend to the actor Charles Laughton and to the artist Fernand Léger, both of whom were working for Korda at the time; the producer introduced them as well to H. G. Wells, who had written an early draft of the screenplay. Saint-Exupéry also ran into an old friend in London. The two dejected Frenchmen sat down for a late drink one night in a run-down club, where a barmaid could not take her eyes off the aviator. After a few minutes she came by. “Tonio—don’t you remember me?” “Paulette!” cried a revived Saint-Exupéry, recognizing an old acquaintance from a Dakar nightclub. Side by side the two gossiped happily about the entire Aéropostale clan, a conversation that amused Jeanson more than Paulette’s manager, who instructed her to move on to the bar’s other customers. At this Saint-Exupéry rose—“Saint-Exupéry le pacifique. Saint-Exupéry le doux,” as Jeanson put it—and pulled the man toward him by the tie. “You will apologize immediately to this lady,” he exploded, shaking the surprised manager. “Don’t you understand that this lady is a friend of my friends?” A few overturned tables later the Frenchman got his apology. Doubtless he was already seething with frustration, having found that England inspired him not at all and that Korda had no real need for his counsel. When the producer generously proposed that the two writers might be more comfortable at a country estate he had found for them than at the Savoy, Saint-Exupéry took advantage of the occasion to ask for a ticket home. He explained to Korda that—odd though it sounded—he had no ideas in England; Shakespeare had claimed them all. The next day he was back in France.*
In October, in one of two Latécoère 28’s on loan from Air France, Saint-Exupéry flew to Mogador (today Essaouira), on the Moroccan coast, to supervise the filming of Courrier Sud. He proved an invaluable asset to the production which already benefited from full civic and military cooperation. It was not always easy, however, to maintain order on a set peopled by authentic Senegalese guards (provided by the army), Moorish blue men (ostensibly recruited by Saint-Exupéry), Arab cameleers, and Mogador prisoners, freed briefly to assist in towing the Latécoères through the dunes. Nor was it easy to impress upon the Moors what, exactly, cinema was: in the first simulated attack, they came hurtling over the dunes, roaring realistically, and overturned the camera. Its operator managed a narrow escape. Saint-Exupéry’s primary concern, other than the verisimilitude of the set, was the direction of the Latécoères; he took the controls for most of the shots of the takeoffs and landings. Most memorably, he served as his own stuntman. For one scene a Latécoère needed to make a dramatic takeoff from between two 50-foot dunes, from a strip of sand about 200 yards long. The film’s pilot, who had measured the distance, categorically refused to attempt the takeoff. Saint-Exupéry offered to take the airplane up alone. With four men holding it in place—the aircraft had no brakes—he throttled up. The airplane was then let go, and he taxied, tail down, two-thirds of the way down the sand corridor. In the nick of time the Latécoère took to the air, having been catapulted off a rock hidden under the sand. Saint-Exupéry cleared the far dune by a matter of inches. He could not have known about the rock, and afterward admitted that he had been a little nervous. Still, he had wanted at all costs to prove the feat was possible. The film’s official pilot was staggered, having estimated his chance of success at about one in ten.
~
On December 7, 1936, the Saint-Exupérys had guests to dinner at the place Vauban. The Swiss composer Arthur Honegger was there; so was Madame de B. Their host said little, and made trips to the telephone every five minutes. Finally he confided to Madame de B: “Mermoz transmitted a final message: ‘Cutting off rear engine.” ’ His colleague had set out that morning with a four-member crew from Dakar to cross the South Atlantic in the flying boat La Croix du Sud. Three and a half hours into the flight he had transmitted the four-word message; it was not in itself cause for concern, but had been followed by a silence that had yet to be broken. When ten minutes had elapsed without any further communication every radio station from Paris to Buenos Aires snapped to attention, to listen and wait. “It would be ridiculous to worry over someone ten minutes late in our day-to-day existence, but in the airmail service ten minutes can be pregnant with meaning,” wrote Saint-Exupéry, who was that evening in the middle of his vigil.
The two men had argued violently about politics but in the end had salvaged their friendship, largely by choosing to sidestep any ideological discussion. Saint-Exupéry was stricken by Mermoz’s disappearance, which he only slowly came to admit was his complete loss. Naturally he became his friend’s premier eulogist: in his first piece on France’s most popular aviator he chose to draw up a catalogue of close calls. If Guillaumet had walked out of the Andes after five days, if Reine and Serre had disappeared into the Sahara and reemerged intact months later, if twenty aircraft searching the Libyan desert had failed to turn up two men walking directly below them, could Mermoz not still be alive, he asked on the thirteenth in L’Intransigeant? By the sixteenth he was a little more disposed to concede defeat, this time on the front page of Marianne. He was still not ready to ascribe to Mermoz all the virtues to which the dead are automatically entitled, however: “You are a friend, with all the marvelous failings that so endear you. And I am waiting to remind you of them. I don’t want to respect you yet. I am keeping your place in all those little bistros where we used to meet. You will be late as always, oh, my insufferable friend … I am so afraid of never again getting on your nerves.”
It was a threnody consistent with the nature of many of Saint-Exupéry’s closest friendships—that with Ségogne, for example—which proceeded as much by endearing complaint and accusation as anything else. “When we lose a friend it is probably his faults that we mourn,” Saint-Exupéry had written earlier, in a revealing statement. Soon enough he had grown accustomed to the idea that the thinning Aéropostale ranks had thinned again. A year after Mermoz’s disappearance he spoke eloquently about the slow admission of loss, about the irreplaceability of old friends. “Old friends aren’t made overnight.… It is useless, having planted an acorn in the morning, to expect to sit in the shade of an oak that afternoon.” He began to grasp what was so unnerving about this kind of loss: “Mermoz has disappeared, and he was so much a part of us that many of us ache now with a melancholy that is unfamiliar, that is new to us: the secret regret of growing old.”
There was every reason for Saint-Exupéry to feel
an artifact. Not only had Aéropostale and its glories ceased to exist, not only did the desultory, directionless France of 1936 look shorn of any such grandeur, but the men responsible for the pioneering mails were fast disappearing. Mermoz’s death left, of the early Aéropostale pilots, only Guillaumet, Reine, Serre, and Saint-Exupéry. He must have been thrilled when, a few days before Christmas, Pierre Cot, then the Air Minister, gave his consent to an African propaganda tour proposed by Saint-Exupéry and underwritten as well by L’Intransigeant, to whom he promised a write-up of the flight. Cot granted the author-aviator a 40,000-franc subsidy and agreed to see that the government pay for his insurance. Air France also backed the flight to Timbuktu, for which they offered to provide the fuel. (Their interest was presumably in an alternate France—Dakar route, passing inland via Oran instead of along the coast to Casablanca, a route that would once and for all have obviated the need to overfly Spanish territory.) Saint-Exupéry submitted to a medical exam at Le Bourget on January 29 and took off with Prévot, via Marseilles and Casablanca, a few days later. The raid took the two men over utterly virgin territory—“over blindingly white sand, tiring to the eyes and devoid of any trace of life,” as the pilot described it—but this desert excursion of 5,500 miles went off without a hitch. (The two men were once again flying without a radio; having presumably learned his lesson, Saint-Exupéry had applied for one in January, but his request had been denied by the implacable French bureaucracy on the grounds that Prévot was not qualified to operate one.) Along the way Saint-Exupéry acquired a lion cub, which he attempted to bring back to France with him. The cub did not take well to flight, and the pilot was forced to fly north in a series of dives and climbs in an effort to keep the animal subdued by knocking it against the ceiling of the cabin. He found this good fun, especially in retrospect. Prévot must have been less amused by the cub’s confused pawing, of which he wore the evidence all over his hands and arms. He had as well contracted malaria; his fidelity to Saint-Exupéry seemed destined to be compensated in medical bills.
