by Stacy Schiff
Otherwise the pioneering trip went off splendidly, doing much to restore the pilot’s faith in himself as what Noëlle Guillaumet described as “a man of the air and of the desert.” From Algeria in mid-February he mailed several letters that shimmer with his satisfaction. To Madame de B he wrote from Oran that he was delighted with the trip, which he had made entirely outside of the existing trails, even when he could have followed them. “I felt confident and undertook everything lightly, sure of my eyes and of my calculations.… I return pleased with the trip and with myself … mountains, storms, sands, those are my household gods.” A few days later, from Algiers, he boasted to Guillaumet of the flawless navigation he had performed with his top-of-the-line instruments. It was true that he had been graced by good weather, but he had all the same flown with impressive accuracy over thousands of miles of uncharted territory. He sounded, in his note to Guillaumet, like his lighthearted self. It was easy enough to see why: ‘T have just relived a few hours of the best years of my life,” he signed off.
“I have an account to settle with the desert,” Saint-Exupéry had said before setting off for Timbuktu. He had settled it; his feelings about writing for a living proved more difficult to resolve. The promised L’Intransigeant articles were never written. He may have negotiated a substitution: in the first week of April the newspaper carried a front-page account of Guillaumet’s ordeal in the Andes, a near-final draft of what was to appear later in Wind, Sand and Stars. Evidently Saint-Exupéry preferred still the distant to the recent past. He sold a piece on a Saharan emergency landing to the Surrealist journal Minotaure, which appeared under the title “Un Mirage.” He put the finishing touches on a screenplay—never filmed, and never unearthed—called “Radium,” completed at the end of April, and he solicited assignments from Marianne. Any illusions he may have had about the integrity of the press were shattered on his return to Paris in late March, however, when he discovered that a sensationalist journal had published a story claiming he had concocted the Libyan accident. In January Voltaire alleged that he had landed quietly in a Cairo suburb, covered the wings of his Simoun with sand so as to disguise it, then stumbled into the city with his invented tale. Raccaud’s desertion of the two airmen on the Continental steps had evidently fueled this accusation—against which Saint-Exupéry loyalists have had to defend the pilot as recently as 1987—although Voltaire was, as everyone knew, an inventive publication under the best of circumstances. Saint-Exupéry instituted a libel suit against the journal, which he won handily. The court found he had been defamed, awarding him 15,000 francs (today about $9,000) in damages. He was, however, cut to the quick by the entire incident. Once again this spring the man who claimed mountains, storms, and sands as his household gods found himself not on the offensive, fighting for his life in the Libyan desert, but on the defensive, battling men, whose stature was sometimes smaller even than it appeared from the air.
* Or so Saint-Exupéry told reporters following the crash. In hindsight these became the white wine, orange, and grapes of Wind, Sand and Stars.
* Korda’s aviation film ran into greater troubles than simply those caused by the defection of the two Frenchmen. Shelved repeatedly over the next years, Conquest of the Air was released finally in 1940, with a story credit to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
XIII
~
Civil Evening Twilight
1937–1939
One must pay dearly for immortality: one has to die several times while still alive.
NIETZSCHE, Ecce Homo
France, in 1937, was a country befuddled. When she looked around she seemed to be one of the last great hopes for liberal democracy in Europe, but she did not often dare to look around. There was constant talk of Franco, of Mussolini, of Hitler; the Spanish Civil War dominated the newspapers during the second half of 1936 and into 1937. But all the talk of the threat to the legitimate Spanish government, of the invasion of Ethiopia, of Germany’s repeated aggressions, amounted to precisely that: talk. It was the chatter of a confused, divided people reeling with their own problems, obsessed with their own intrigues, bruised still by a war they could not conceive of fighting again. Across the Channel the British governments of Baldwin and Chamberlain followed the affairs of Europe with apathy and disinterest, convinced that Churchill’s warnings were idle exaggerations; understandably, France had no burning interest in taking a lonely stand as the defender of European democracy. As early as 1935 the writing had been on the wall, however. Sometimes it was even eloquent. That year Jean Giraudoux published Tiger at the Gates, a play that trumpeted—in its keen-witted, agreeable manner—the news that war was inevitable.
France chose to look the other way when Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland in 1936, the first opportunity she had to stop him and arguably the last occasion on which she was still militarily strong enough to do so. When civil war broke out in Spain she again backed away, worried that intervention would plunge her directly into a confrontation with Italy and Germany. That conflict, which France worked so hard to avoid, made itself felt all the same: it went a great way toward destabilizing the tentative alliance on which the Front Populaire government of Léon Blum, forged in the fury of 1934 and voted in with much enthusiasm two years later, had been based. When it was revealed that Blum had been approached by the Spanish Loyalists for arms and had not automatically refused, things began to go awry, enough so that the new premier, acting against his principles, was shamed into maintaining strict neutrality. He lost support on the Left—where cries of “Airplanes for Spain!” went up regularly—for treating Franco too gingerly. The Right—desperate for ground on which to break up the government—accused him of being anything but conciliatory. Its extreme elements painted Blum as a warmonger. France was at the time a country so much racked by infighting, so skittish, so bleary-eyed, that Blum’s instinctive reaction was seen not as a heroic vote cast on a dark day in favor of liberty, fraternity, and equality but as a subversive act of a guileful politician bent on engaging France in a conflict with Germany because he was a Jew and had a personal account to settle with Hitler.
Between March 1936, when Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland, and March 1938, when he continued on into Austria, one could practically hear the heavy footfalls in the distance. In Paris this registered to many only as ripples in the café glasses. Those in power were intent on pursuing their own political agendas; le Tout-Paris merrily decanted its best vintages and threw balls at which to discuss these baroque goings-on; the man in the street focused on the country’s pressing domestic problems. France still not having succeeded in pulling out of the Depression, these were years when bad economic news was the order of the day. Unemployment ran wild. The already-weak franc was devalued in 1936 (by the summer of 1939 it was not worth three pennies); the stock market crashed in early June 1937. The supposed villains, in the guise of the Banque de France–controlling “200 families,” were denounced daily. High hopes for the Front Populaire fizzled quickly, replaced by a kind of last-resort despair. Despite the strikes and riots and unemployment, business went on as usual, however, 1937 amounting to a kind of squall before the storm. Not much actually happened in Europe that year: Germany continued on its course to rearm. The Spanish government did its best to hold out against Franco’s forces. Italy defied the League of Nations in Abyssinia. And France muddled along. By now entirely pessimistic about the economy, no one was much surprised when the Front Populaire’s ambitious and expensive reforms were put on hold in February. By now accustomed to the instability of the body politic, no one was much surprised when Blum’s government fell in mid-June, after one year in office.
Paris itself—for all of the unrest—remained a garden of earthly delights. There were signs, however, that the city was beginning to look more like a fool’s paradise. One thing that did happen in 1937 was the Paris World’s Fair, officially known as the “Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques.” By the end of the summer the city looked more splendid than ever, fitted
with an ingeniously designed series of fountains and lights that together worked to produce “geysers of liquid electric color.” If she could do little else France could still throw a fine party: a record-setting two hundred million tickets were sold to the Exposition of 1937, the largest such celebration of its time. Saint-Exupéry bought a ticket, late in August; he was even obliging enough to try the parachute jump off a 100-foot tower installed on the Esplanade des Invalides, a feat he claimed the single most terrifying moment of his life. (He suffered from vertigo.) For this demonstration of courage he was awarded a certificate, which he kept.
The fair hardly began as the success it became, however. Scheduled to open on May 1 along several acres of the Seine, from the Invalides to the Eiffel Tower, “l’Expo ‘37” was held up by a number of well-coordinated labor strikes. (By the end of the year the Left-leaning government would be forced to do its share of strikebreaking, an irony not lost on Henri Jeanson, who relished absurdity of any kind and reported on this one with gusto.) On May 1 the Esplanade des Invalides remained a muddy wasteland; only four countries’ pavilions were finished. In a poor advertisement for democracy, three of them belonged to what Pierre Lazareff called “the three dictatorships,” Germany, Italy, and Russia. The exhibition opened officially on May 24, although even then it was far from ready. Skeletons of buildings dotted the fairgrounds; the exhibition’s vast array of lights did not fully function until August. Albert Speer’s ambitious German pavilion, one of the first structures to be completed, stood grandly at the foot of the Pont d’Iéna on the Right Bank. Over it, perched atop a 170-foot tower, hovered an immense golden eagle, a swastika in his claws. Bathed in tones of topaz and emerald, Paris had never looked so beautiful. But from everywhere in the city—and most distinctly from the terrace of a sixth-floor apartment on the place Vauban—one could, if one looked, see the future.
René Delange noticed that, on the place Vauban, Saint-Exupéry began to show a little more patience for talking with the country’s politicians. General Davet’s impression was that he was somewhat embarrassed not to have taken the political scene more seriously; evidently their mutual friend Mermoz had interviewed everyone from the then-Communist Jacques Doriot to the Comte de Paris before settling on his Croix-de-Feu affiliation. It seems more likely that Saint-Exupéry feigned embarrassment out of deference to his friend, there being no record of his ever having regretted an active involvement in politics and plenty to the contrary. In any event this spring he began his crash course in political awareness which—if it failed to inculcate in him any particular ideology—did confirm him in his belief that war was no solution to anyone’s problems.
This spring Paris-Soir offered Saint-Exupéry an astronomical 80,000 francs, roughly $32,000 today, to return to Spain. He was to deliver ten pieces to the newspaper. He accepted the offer, arriving at the Spanish border in the paper’s plane on April 11. He spent the following day in Valencia, straightening out his papers and applying for letters of introduction that would enable him, in Madrid, to visit the Republican front. “I’m not interested in visiting a city, even one under bombardment, dining at a hotel and sleeping at night in my bed. I am absolutely not interested in interviewing generals,” he wrote a friend. He did stay, either on the way to or from the front and during a heavy bombardment, at Madrid’s Hotel Florida, but he does not appear to have spent time with Hemingway, Dos Passos, or any of the other foreign journalists assembled there. And he did meet Jeanson, in Madrid at the time as a correspondent for the satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaîné. Jeanson saw to it that Saint-Exupéry got out of town: He knew the leader of the Fédération Anarchiste Ibérique (FAI), who arranged for the transportation of the two journalists to the front. Buenaventura Durruti outfitted the Frenchmen with a chauffeured Rolls-Royce and affably sent them off, wishing them a pleasant stay in Spain. The driver conformed to what one might expect of an anarchist’s chauffeur: he flew over the rutty, uneven roads that led to the city’s southwestern edge at high speed, singing love songs and gaily engaging in a game the drivers had invented. When another of the party’s cars approached, the two accelerated; by way of salute they attempted, at ninety miles per hour, to relieve the other of his fender. Jeanson disapproved of this manner of greeting and counseled the driver to be a little more considerate of his spanking-new Rolls. Saint-Exupéry was of little help: he wickedly informed the driver that his friend was prepared to give him a bonus of 500 pesetas for every fender removed. At this the chauffeur changed his tune to the “Internationale” and stepped on the gas.
On the front the writer proved no less intrepid, playing a version of Russian roulette that the anarchists had invented, performed with a lighted stick of dynamite. Equally courageous were his absentminded moments, on which he himself unabashedly reported. In the front-line trenches of the Guadalajara front a little over a week later he started one night to light up a cigarette. Two powerful hands put an end to his stupidity, which was met with the whistle of bullets. “One does not light a cigarette in the face of the enemy,” Saint-Exupéry concluded. On another occasion, toward 3:00 a.m., he slipped into a prohibited area to observe the anarchists loading a shipment of matériel into a cargo train. Somehow he had convinced himself that he would be invisible in the dark; the barrel of a gun against his stomach proved him wrong. Hands in the air, he waited for the anarchist to fire (“It was a time of precipitous judgments,” he noted), a moment that never came. Instead he was led, at gunpoint, to a dingy underground guard station. He was searched and his fate was discussed in Catalan, yet another language he did not speak. His camera, seemingly a piece of incriminating evidence, was seized and passed around. He tried to impress upon his captors that he was a journalist, but when asked for his papers had to admit he had left them at the hotel.
Saint-Exupéry proved as reluctant as ever to use the word “courage” but at the same time remained preoccupied by an old question, the one he had put to Henri Delaunay years earlier at Cape Juby. One night on the Carabanchel front he watched as an attack was prepared, then called off. The sergeant who was to have led it was awakened—by a group of soldiers and the Frenchman, all seated on his bed—with the news that he was not to race out to meet his death that morning. As Saint-Exupéry saw it, the sergeant had gone to sleep with a death sentence and risen with a pardon. “How does man receive the gift of life? I can answer that. A man sits still, pulls a bit of tobacco out of his pocket, nods his head slowly, looks up at the ceiling, and says, ‘Suits me,” ’ he wrote. In his mind he had only one question for the officer: “Sergeant, what is it that makes you willing to die?” He had, of course, some experience with this mystery, which helped him to formulate his answer. Under Daurat’s command he had fought a kind of battle and he understood its attractions; the camaraderie, the discipline, the higher calling of la Ligne had all been carried over from the Great War. He had loved that displaced war as much as he was now repulsed by the real thing, but was quick to see that all men thirsted for communion, for a cause. All ideology was simply a means to an end, an attempt to quench a deep-seated thirst. In satisfying that need man fulfilled himself, he argued, falling back on every one of his favorite images: it delivered man from his cocoon, it awakened in him the sleeping prince, it was as much a part of the natural order of things as eels flocking to the sea, wild gazelles returning from captivity to the desert. He had been as susceptible to this “brotherhood in the face of danger” as anyone; he had written odes to its liberating power for years. “Pilots meet if they are fighting to deliver the same mail; the Brown Shirts, if they are offering their lives to the same Hitler; the mountain climbers, if they are aiming for the same peak. Men do not unite by moving toward each other directly but only by losing themselves in the same god,” he noted, unable to condemn any man for seeing to a need as basic as that for water.
In both of his absentminded moments Saint-Exupéry discovered another kind of communion. After enemy fire had deprived him of his cigarette he witnessed an amazing scene, which
he recast slightly with a wink to Léon Werth. “Looks as if the lads across the way were awake,” one of the Loyalists commented after the shots that had greeted the visitor’s lighted match. “Do you think they’ll talk tonight? We’d like to talk to them.” From behind their stone wall one of the Loyalist sentinels called across to the enemy, “Antonio! Are you asleep? Antonio! It’s me! Leo!” His call was not met by gunfire but, after a long silence, by “Quiet! Go to bed! Time to sleep!” Delighted by this bit of motherly advice from the enemy a Loyalist flew a second volley out into the night. It sounded as if he had been coached by the visiting Frenchman: “Antonio, what are you fighting for?” he called. “Spain!” came back the answer. “You?” “The bread of our brothers,” responded the Loyalist, and the two wished each other a good night. “Their words were not the same, but their truths were identical,” wrote Saint-Exupéry in Wind, Sand and Stars, displaying the same impatience for partisanship that had made him such a disarming moderator that night years before on the rue de Chanaleilles. In the guardhouse to which he had been taken by the train-loading anarchists he was held under surveillance by a team of very bored guards. He suffered mostly from their nerve-racking indifference, which offered no clue as to his fate. Again a cigarette saved the day. One of his jailers was smoking; with a vague smile Saint-Exupéry gestured that he would like very much to do the same. To his stupefaction the guard stretched, studied his prisoner for a moment, and smiled back. “It was like the break of day,” wrote Saint-Exupéry, delivered by this simple exchange. The cigarette was offered, “and, the ice broken, the other guards, too, became men again; I entered into their smiles as into a new and free country.… We met in a smile above language, castes, parties.”
