Saint-exupery: A Biography

by Stacy Schiff

  Saint-Exupéry is said to have met with Premier Paul Reynaud at 6:00 p.m. on the sixteenth, which he could not have done, as Reynaud had welcomed Churchill to an emergency meeting at the Quai d’Orsay thirty minutes earlier. (There Churchill learned that the Sedan front had been broken and that eight or ten German divisions, having cut the French forces in half, were now speeding toward Amiens and Arras. He was told in the next moment that the French had no strategic reserve, an announcement he remembered as one of the greatest surprises of his life. He must have been equally dumbfounded by the bonfires then burning in the Quai d’Orsay garden, into which foreign ministry officials were busily dumping years of French diplomatic archives.) Saint-Exupéry did at some point request to be sent to the United States to plead for aircraft, France having in a matter of weeks lost three-fourths of her fighter planes, and to ask Roosevelt to intervene in what was otherwise clearly a losing battle. His offer was turned down; about two weeks later the same mission was entrusted to René de Chambrun, a young lawyer who, like Saint-Exupéry, was both a captain and a count, but who made for a more natural envoy because—in no particular order—he spoke perfect English, was a direct descendant of Lafayette, and happened to be Pierre Laval’s son-in-law.

  Disgusted by the seeming indifference he felt in Paris, where the policemen were now equipped with rifles, Saint-Exupéry returned to his squadron on the twenty-first, the day they moved west again, to Orly. On the twenty-second two of the group’s Potezes failed to return from missions over eastern France. In one of them Jean Israël was shot down; he was to spend the next five years in prison camps, where—in 1943—he would read Saint-Exupéry’s account of what was to transpire the next day. On the twenty-third Saint-Exupéry set off from Orly with Jean Dutertre as his observer, on one of the two missions he was to conflate into the long, hair-raising meditation that is Flight to Arras, the supreme description of aerial warfare. The mission had been ordered by the High Command to determine whether Arras was holding its own; it was the first that had fallen to Saint-Exupéry in more than six weeks, which made it his first since the fighting had really begun. He flew north to Meaux that morning to join up with his fighter escort; when the pilots of the 1/33—whose group commander had initially refused to cooperate with the mission—learned that the reconnaissance pilot was the Académie Française laureate they scrambled for the honor of defending him.

  Saint-Exupéry took off from an overcast Meaux just before 2:00 p.m. with an escort of nine Dewoitine 520’s; from a height of 1,000 feet Dutertre was to establish the enemy position between Arras and Douai. Saint-Exupéry turned the machine-gun fire into poetry; Dutertre—one of the only men in the world to whom Flight to Arras is a novel—tersely described the apocalyptic sight that lay below. Hundreds of tanks were gathered less than two miles southwest of the city, waiting to attack. Arras was smoking like a volcano; the sky was alternately thick with dark smoke and brilliantly lit by fire. Suddenly Dutertre saw that the Bloch was about to overfly a tank formation; he cried to the pilot to turn, but was late in doing so. The Germans opened fire and the Bloch lurched violently. The observer waited a few seconds before asking, “Is something broken?” An oil tank was punctured, Saint-Exupéry reported; Dutertre directed him to return to the base. Minutes later they were flying through the sunny skies of Normandy, gasping with relief. At 3:30, without further incident, they landed at Orly. The two men laughed together as they jumped out of the aircraft, the observer more nimbly than the pilot. Saint-Exupéry offered Dutertre a cigarette, although he was unable to find a match, as he is unable to do throughout Flight to Arras. Later they learned that two of the escort pilots had been shot down; one pilot had been taken prisoner, and another had been hurt when he parachuted onto a chimney. Captain de Saint-Exupéry expressed his gratitude to the 1/33 with his customary wit. Without their help, he wrote in their visitors’ book, “I would now be playing poker in heaven with Helen of Troy, Vercingétorix, and company—and I continue to prefer to live on this planet, despite its drawbacks.”

  That evening he sat down to dinner at a Porte Maillot bistro called Chez Georges with Madame de B and a doctor friend, who heard the first account of the hour and forty minutes that would become the better part of Flight to Arras. (In theory Saint-Exupéry spared Alias, to whom he made his official report, the observations he made now.) The pilot looked dejected and tired, mumbling a little as he described what appeared from the air to be an “interminable syrup” of refugees flowing south. He was used to frequent displacements but not entirely to the contrast between a war mission and a cozy dinner with friends, and felt it a little perverse to be holding forth in a good Parisian restaurant after having so narrowly escaped death. One minute, he told a reporter later, he could be eating his breakfast in a café, flirting with the waitress; two hours later he was back for lunch, having in the meantime gone off to survey the Rhine. “I felt like a fish being walked on the beach,” he said of the schizophrenic existence that allowed him to wax poetic about German fireworks while devouring a well-prepared Châteaubriand aux pommes. For his front-row seat at those pyrotechnic displays he was awarded a Croix de Guerre avec Palme early in June.

  Saint-Exupéry flew three additional high-altitude missions between May 31 and June 9, by which time Dunkirk had fallen and German tanks were swarming all over eastern France, their officers waving amiably to the population. On Monday the tenth and Tuesday the eleventh everyone who could left Paris, including the government, which retired provisionally to Tours. Said Werth, himself part of the mass exodus, “We amount to nothing but links in a chain, drawn slowly along the road, at speeds of six, of three miles an hour.” He blamed Saint-Exupéry for having further slowed his trip south; he was weighted down by an inscribed copy of Terre des hommes, his most valuable possession. It is not known exactly when Consuelo left Paris, where she had been early in May; evidently on one of his trips to Paris her husband saw to it that she was evacuated, initially to Lyons.

  What remained of the 2/33—now about two-thirds of its original size—began its withdrawal that Monday as well, a retreat that was not without its moments. In La Chapelle-Vendômoise, eighty-five miles southwest of Orly, Saint-Exupéry and Guy Bougerol, a lieutenant observer who happened to be a Franciscan father, were billeted in the local château, the owners of which were unhappy about the arrangement. Fearing German reprisals, they issued their guests strict instructions to observe the blackout and to keep as quiet as possible, easy conditions to meet as their rooms adjoined and the two men spent the night talking. Before going to sleep Saint-Exupéry had to leave the room; he turned the handle of his door to find that it came off in his hand. The same was true of Bougerol’s, the two officers having been imprisoned by their nervous hosts. Outside the window ledge hung a bell cord; the not-very-spry flyer edged toward it and began, at about 2:00 a.m., ringing the château bell with all his might. As soon as his hostess appeared in the courtyard with a faintly lit gas lamp he launched into a vehement speech, inciting the populace to rebellion, from the ledge above her. When the châtelaine grasped the physiological urge behind this call-to-arms she released him immediately from his room, falling all over herself with apologies. “Monsieur de Saint-Exupéry, allow me to kiss you!” she cried. “Never!” responded Saint-Exupéry superbly, heading past her to the toilet.

  The 2/33 was still in La Chapelle-Vendômoise when the Germans entered a deserted Paris on Friday, June 14, and swastikas began to fly from the Arc de Triomphe, the Quai d’Orsay, and the Eiffel Tower. The squadron was moving on to Bordeaux—“driven by the enemy from field to field like poor devils pursued by a relentless bailiff,” as Saint-Exupéry put it—as Reynaud handed in his resignation, unwilling to break with the British and make a separate peace with the Germans, and Marchai Pétain, the eighty-four-year-old embodiment of French military glory, came to power with the aim of seeking an immediate peace. “The news from France is very bad,” Churchill conceded on the seventeenth. In New York Raoul de Roussy de Sales went fur
ther: “France has fallen from the height often centuries of history in thirty-eight days. This is the inescapable fact, but it is so tremendous no one is capable of grasping it.” One Frenchman who did was in London; the following day Charles de Gaulle broadcast his call-to-arms over the BBC, a speech that lasted four minutes and did more at the time to make him a persona non grata in France than to establish him as his country’s savior. Another Frenchman continued south: “We’re off to Algeria.… Don’t expect mail as it will be impossible, but know of my affection,” Saint-Exupéry hurriedly wrote his mother.

  On the Bordeaux-Mérignac tarmac stood a fabulous array of aircraft, packed wing to wing. Saint-Exupéry piled a number of spare parts and some forty passengers—including a woman, a cage of birds, and a dog, because of which he would refer to the aircraft later as “Noah’s Ark”—into a four-motor Farman 220. It was not the airplane he was meant to take—he should have salvaged a Bloch—and the hulking machine resembled nothing he had ever flown. But as the Farman could carry ground personnel and parts to North Africa, where the 2/33 was to continue its operations, Saint-Exupéry took it upon himself to appropriate the passenger plane. It was an unfinished prototype, however, and its bolts began to give over the Mediterranean, a fact the pilot took great pleasure in announcing to the exhausted Red Cross nurse on board. He woke Suzanne Massu repeatedly with terrifying bulletins and—misconstruing fatigue for sangfroid—was impressed to find her unflappable. Saint-Exupéry piloted the Farman through a heavy fog pierced on all sides by other aircraft; it was as if he and his passengers took advantage of a flock of wild birds for their escape, as would one of his later heroes. On the afternoon of the twenty-first he landed in Oran, where he expected to find his squadron; the signals had been crossed, however, and they were waiting for him in Algiers. The following morning he was over the Maison-Blanche field, again pestering Suzanne Massu. Most of the French air force had retreated to Algiers, and he saw no room to land. After circling the field several times Saint-Exupéry maneuvered the Farman to the ground in what was deemed an acrobatic feat. The armistice having been signed the previous day, the pilots and parts he had transported were now useless. He was, as he put it, out of work. That day Hitler treated himself to a tour of Paris, sullen and silent, but still beautiful.

  In Algiers the French officers checked into the Hôtel Aletti, the center of French political intrigue for the four years to come. Saint-Exupéry called Pélissier, who crept through a pitch-black night to join him in his room. Pélissier found his friend exhausted and horrified, increasingly resigned, as the days wore on, to the impossibility of continuing the fight. In the Aletti bar a group of flyers gathered every evening to discuss the ardent battle they hoped to wage; they had airplanes—some 800 in fact, and in the 2/33’s case more than they had had at the beginning of the war—but were hopelessly short on fuel, parts, and ground crews. Saint-Exupéry was rarely in attendance, entirely silent when he was. With a sad smile the author of Terre des hommes explained his discretion to Suzanne Mas su: “Pointless to extinguish their faith.”

  XV

  ~

  Resistance on Fifth Avenue

  1940–1942

  Set down three Frenchmen in the deserts of Libya: before a month is out they will be wrangling and scratching at one another.

  MONTAIGNE, Essays

  As a reserve officer, Saint-Exupéry was demobilized on July 31, five weeks after his arrival in Algiers. With regrets of all kinds he left his group, effusively inscribing a copy of Terre des hommes to Gavoille before doing so. On the dedication page he sketched a dazed-looking version of his little bonhomme: “This is me, demobilized and uncertain of the future,” he scrawled underneath. On August 4 Alias and a few other members of the squadron saw him off on board the Lamoricière, on which he was to sail for Marseilles. In a few poignant moments in the ship’s bar Saint-Exupéry confessed that he had been nervous about making a late debut as a military pilot, that he had been in over his head in Orconte at first, and that he was extremely grateful to the 2/33—the spirit of which had so reminded him of Aéropostale—for having welcomed him as warmly as it had. For its part, the 2/33 reported that with the pilot’s departure the group had “lost its soul.”

  He arrived in Marseilles the following day with three francs and fifty centimes to his name, doubtless in large part because, ever the grand seigneur, he had treated the group to a lavish banquet before leaving Algiers. Fortunately Madame de B was waiting for him in Marseilles. She accompanied him to Agay, where he buried himself in his writing; she settled in at a nearby villa with her son and her family. She had no trouble understanding his disillusionment, about which she was more than articulate: under the name Hélène Froment she published a novel with Gallimard a year later about the impossible love affair between a military doctor and a married nurse who has loved him since childhood, a novel that bears certain echoes of Southern Mail and much louder ones of Saint-Exupéry. Writes the hero of On ne revient pas (No Way Back) from the front in 1940, “My companions are all fine men, and I am happy to share their lives, their rain, their mud, their melancholy days,” paraphrasing Saint-Exupéry, whose vocabulary he shares, and who had written that letter in December 1939. Captain Bernard Fontaine thirsts for the absolute, is cut to the quick by the dissensions among men, and prefers the higher calling of his profession to a life of domestic calm. Overwhelmed by the cataclysm around him, he proves wed to his métier, impossible to tame.

  Mireille d’Agay, Saint-Exupéry’s niece, remembered the summer of 1940 as one of preoccupied, whispering adults, of the same kind of late-night sobriety that Saint-Exupéry had sensed in the corridors of Saint-Maurice in 1914. Her uncle worked nearly all the time—he himself compared the occupation to being in a monastery, an appropriate analogy, given the tone of the pages at hand—and his nieces and nephew got used to tiptoeing past his door. In Mireille’s eleven-year-old eyes the highlight of the stay, the writer’s longest at Agay and his last, were the late-night readings. She and her sister would slide out of bed and down the hallway to the living room, where their mother, a finger to her lips, would signal for them to install themselves on the carpet. Bewitched, the adults sat perfectly still as Saint-Exupéry read from his long “poem,” a book of parables set in the desert into which he was busily inserting the sum of his experience, an ambitious undertaking that—at the age of forty—he began to refer to as “my posthumous work.” Drunk on its images, a little dizzy from the haze of cigarette smoke that accumulated around a declaiming Saint-Exupéry, the children stumbled off to bed late in the evening without a word. Their uncle went back to his room and back to work. By the end of the summer he had a good-sized chunk of manuscript, which he rarely let out of his sight.

  He was not, however, one to spend the war writing on the Riviera. No obvious alternative presented itself: there were few places where a Frenchman could hold his head high in the autumn of 1940. Over the course of several August weeks Madame de B’s brother tried to convince him to join de Gaulle in London, but Saint-Exupéry—who had been put off by de Gaulle’s bitter BBC attack on Pétain just after the armistice—had already heard as much as he cared to about the renegade general and his aspirations, which in 1940 seemed far-fetched at best. Nor did he have any taste for Vichy, particularly as the autumn wore on and the regime’s anti-Jewish measures were promulgated. Hardly a proponent of compromise under the best of circumstances, he was unwilling to enter into the double game many played with the occupying power; any argument to sauver les meubles (“salvage the furniture”) was lost on a man who had none. Gallimard had burned its files and retreated to the Riviera, leaving a number of worried writers tugging at Gaston’s purse strings; it looked as if the influential NRF would be salvaged by the Nazis for their own aims. Saint-Exupéry could not have been entirely certain that he would be able to publish in his own country, at least without being conscripted by forces with which he did not wish to associate. To complicate matters his health continued to deteriorate, tak
ing a toll on his nerves. The south of France was packed with refugees, creating shortages of food and gasoline; he had no reserves of cash. He also had a wife to support: La Feuilleraie being in the occupied zone, Consuelo had now settled—against her husband’s wishes—in a sort of artists’ colony in the abandoned old city of the tiny Vaucluse town of Oppède, an experience she was to write about later. On the subject of her husband at this time her description was entirely accurate: “He turned in circles like a caged bear.”

  Saint-Exupéry considered himself “half-separated” from Consuelo, on whom he had come to learn he could not rely, and with whom honesty was not always the best policy. When he had sent instructions to Becker from the front as to how he would want his estate divided in the event of his death he left a third of it to his mother, an installment he begged Becker not to mention to Consuelo. All the same he felt as responsible as ever for his wife, and since he was not particularly versed in domestic responsibility and she was particularly adept at acting irresponsibly, he often had reason to feel guilty on her account (as, doubtless, did she on his). Madame de Saint-Exupéry assured her son that he had done all he could for Consuelo, given a set of imperfect circumstances. He spoke of her rarely, except to the Werths, who before the debacle so often passed on messages from one spouse to the other. That summer Suzanne Werth finally confided her utter mystification about their friend’s love life to Madame de B, who explained—rather lucidly, for someone in the thick of it—that while Antoine felt like a parent with Consuelo he was with her like a child. He came to her for refuge, as Fontaine does Beatrice, the heroine of On ne revient pas. Like Beatrice she “wanted to protect him, care for him, sustain him,” to dress him and reassure him and send him back out to the battle with a word of encouragement. She loved him enough to provide these services, although he was not her only child—her son was quite young —and she was therefore not able to be with him as much as she might like. Their periods of separation would only increase in the years of muddled geography that followed, as three-fifths of France was occupied by the Germans and residents of the capital headed their letters “Paris, Germany.”