by Stacy Schiff
Saint-Exupéry flew around from the Werths to the Gallimards to Sallès early that fall, soliciting advice. Sooner or later the idea of America came up, as it was bound to. “Out of a thousand Frenchmen of whom you ask the question ‘What country would you like to see?’ 999 will answer ‘the United States,’ and the last one will reply ‘New York,’ ” wrote a resident of occupied France the following year. Reynal & Hitchcock represented an end to Saint-Exupéry’s financial embarrassments; America stood clearly as the answer to France’s humiliation. He ran the idea past Werth, the friend he claimed was his conscience, who applauded it, and past Sallès, who put him up in Tarascon while he waited for his papers to be processed in Vichy, the makeshift capital, where he collected them in mid-October.
In Vichy Saint-Exupéry ran into a number of old friends. One was Robert Boname, an Air France Transatlantique engineer and executive to whom he described his plans in the words he was to use repeatedly over the next few weeks: “My friend, there is nothing left to be done here. I’m off.” As the expression on his face indicated that Boname should do the same, the engineer replied, “See you soon, then, on the other side.” Saint-Exupéry explained his thinking to Ségogne with the same shrug of resignation and informed Joseph Kessel that he was going to New York for a month. With Roger Beaucaire, an old Aéropostale colleague who would wind up in America as well, he had dinner at the Hôtel du Parc, Pétain’s headquarters in Vichy, a resort town in which each ministry claimed its own hotel. A private table had been set up in the middle of the dining room for Pierre Laval. According to Beaucaire, when the vice premier (there was no premier and there was no legislature, France now having—not counting the Germans—a government of two, Pétain and Laval) made his entrance Saint-Exupéry said loudly, “There goes the man who’s giving France away.” When informed that every word of his seditious conversation had been overheard by a compatriot who would go on to become Vichy ambassador to Berlin, Saint-Exupéry commented, “Oh, well, now that we’ve said enough to be shot at dawn let’s go for a walk.” If his actual performance was slightly less cinematic the conviction was no less intense.
There were a great number of helpful people in Vichy. Chief among them from Saint-Exupéry’s vantage point was Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, a Gallimard writer who in 1940 was a fascist in all but name. He was in Vichy on NRF business, having been charged by his old friend Otto Abetz, now German ambassador to France, with producing a literary journal of which the occupying power could be proud. With hindsight Saint-Exupéry would doubtless have picked a different travel agent, but Drieu (whom he knew through the Gallimards) managed to see that his papers were readied promptly: The American visa was issued on the twenty-first, and a laissez-passer was provided for Paris, where he wanted to collect his papers. Drieu agreed to drive him to the capital the following day, saving Saint-Exupéry the long wait for a crowded refugee train. On reaching the demarcation line and seeing how easily Drieu glided past the German sentinels at the border of occupied France Saint-Exupéry realized with whom he had accepted a ride. Neither man left any mention of what was discussed during this trip but the subject of NRF must have come up: earlier in the week Gallimard had called on Gide to suggest that the publication could be kept in business with an editorial board composed of Drieu, Paul Éluard, Jean Giono, Malraux, Saint-Exupéry, and Gide, a proposition to which Gide did not lend his support. (He proffered a contribution from his journals instead.) As late as December, in his first issue of the NRF, Drieu promised to publish work by Saint-Exupéry. The latter’s political convictions remained just vague enough for a Nazi sympathizer to make this claim—as for Vichy officials to consider him for a ministry post.
In Paris Saint-Exupéry was asked to submit to an interview with a German officer, a meeting arranged by Drieu. Leaving it at 9:45 p.m. he discovered—with fifteen minutes to curfew—that the Métro had already closed. This time in the manner of “a nimble bear” he ran from the Rond-Point of the Champs-Elysées across the Seine to the 7th arrondissement, terrified that he would be apprehended and his notebooks seized. After the marathon he concluded, disheveled, “I’m not made to live under the Occupation.” Forty-eight hours later he was back in the unoccupied zone, where he set about saying his good-byes. In the course of these weeks, before and after the trip to Vichy, he saw nearly everyone he knew, for the simple reason that nearly everyone still in France who could afford to be—and many who could not—were huddled in the south. He had dinner with his old Saurer boss, from his days as a truck salesman. He saw Guillaumet, more discouraged even than he, largely because he had not witnessed the war firsthand and understood less well why it could not continue. He lunched in Cannes with André Beucler, who did not entirely approve of his hurrying off. “I think it imperative to commit to the homeland, even trampled, even profaned,” said Beucler. “I think it is time to step back, to gain perspective, and I am going to try to get to New York,” countered Saint-Exupéry.
In Lyons he dined with Jean Prévost and a group of friends, among them Françoise Giroud. He finished off the dinner with his usual display of card tricks, offering to let Giroud in on one of his secrets. “You will show me when France is free,” she said, as tears welled in their eyes. He spent three days before the Vichy trip with Werth in Saint-Amour, a visit that left his friend to meditate anew on the marvels of friendship. During his stay Saint-Exupéry expounded on his belief that the obstacles presented to man were but “opportunities for his deliverance,” perhaps an encouraging thing to mention to someone named Werth living in Vichy France less than two weeks after the Jewish Statute had come into effect. Saint-Exupéry had his own way with obstacles, of course: in front of his old Aéropostale colleague Jean Lucas he pulled out a pack of Cravens, almost impossible to find that summer. Lucas expressed surprise. “When I want something,” explained the writer, “I always get it.” He scoured Cannes for Pierre Billon, whom he had heard was in town; dismissing Billon’s fiancée, he told the Courrier Sud director over lunch of his opportunity to leave for America and entrusted him with his sole copy of the treatment for “Igor.” “If I come back,” he promised Billon, “we’ll work on it together.” In Cannes he ran into the director Raymond Bernard, who had brought his parents to the unoccupied zone, and whom he told as well of his imminent departure. Saint-Exupéry was on his way to see his mother in Cabris and suddenly thought it imperative that he introduce Bernard to her, which he was unable to do. He left his mother with a portable radio, which she accepted with tears.
No one forgot these meetings with Saint-Exupéry, which were to be their last; at a time like this one remembered one’s impressions. At the end of October, during his final days in France, he spoke with a reporter from a Lyons newspaper. He rehearsed the story of the Arras flight in his hotel lobby. The reporter accompanied him to the station; as the Académie Française laureate boarded his train, he fired a last question. What did Monsieur de Saint-Exupéry like to read? Elsewhere he was to say that his constant companions at the front were Rilke, Pascal, and Baudelaire; from the running board of the train he summed up this literature quickly: “I like books which give the impression that civilization still exists.”
Saint-Exupéry made his way west via North Africa, for which he sailed on November 5. Naturally he called on the 2/33, who were then stationed, rather idly, near Tunis. He was thrilled to discover in Algiers that René Chambe, an air force officer and writer whom he had known for some time, was also a guest at the Aletti; he rang the colonel’s room at 1:00 a.m. to say he was waiting for him with a bottle of cold champagne, to which the two did justice some time before they parted at four. (Another reunion that week came to an abrupt end when an Italian from the Armistice Commission complained to the hotel about his lively neighbor.) They were in agreement that there was nothing to be done in France; Saint-Exupéry outlined for Chambe his plans for New York, which he now described as embarking on a public relations campaign so as to persuade America to intervene in the war. Chambe was in North Africa
on what was meant to be a journalistic assignment but was a trip for which he had a larger agenda: he had been asked to take the temperature of public opinion, but personally wondered about the loyalty of the 115,000 troops the armistice allowed France to keep in the colonies. With pleasure he took his friend with him on a high-level tour of Morocco, during which it was established that the native population was generally indifferent to the fate of France. More worrisome was the attitude of the military, who reacted coolly to the idea of Americans setting foot in North Africa. The two officers said their good-byes in Marrakech, on the balcony of Chambe’s room at the Hôtel Mamounia. “So, Saint-Ex, when will we see each other again?” asked Chambe over a sustained handshake. “Right here, damn it all, in Africa! When the Americans land I swear to you I will be with them,” the captain assured him.
He arrived in December in Lisbon, a city overflowing with refugees of every kind but in no other way touched by war. He was lucky to find a hotel room in Estoril, a resort town just outside the city, and began the wait for a boat, a debilitating, bureaucratic ordeal for most people. Clearly he still had misgivings about his decision; leaving his country in her hour of need tallied with none of his ideals. An acquaintance from the 1950s who met him again now commented: “Rarely have I seen a person in such an indecisive frame of mind.” He was sickened by the sight of many of those headed in his direction, whom he observed in the Estoril casino: “I felt neither indignation nor disrespect but a vague anguish, the kind you experience at a zoo before the last of an extinct species.… They were gambling fortunes that were—perhaps at the moment they were staked—worthless. They were playing with currencies that may at that moment have been taken out of circulation. Their wealth consisted of factories that might already have been confiscated.… It was unreal, a kind of puppet show.” On the twenty-seventh he received what must under the circumstances have felt an especially cruel blow. Guillaumet was dead, having been shot down over the Mediterranean while flying the new French High Commissioner to Syria. His last words had the same syncopated feel as Mermoz’s—“Under attack. Fire on board. SOS. SO”—and echoed as loudly in Lisbon as anywhere. Saint-Exupéry, who had just lost one world, now found that another had evaporated out from under him. He wrote an especially distraught letter to Madame de B:
Guillaumet is dead. It seems to me tonight as if I have no more friends. I don’t feel sorry for him; I have never been able to pity the dead. But it will take me so long to come to terms with his disappearance, and I’m already burdened by such miserable tasks. It will be months and months; I will need him so often. Does age really claim us so quickly? I’m the last survivor of the old Casa/Dakar team.… All the others are dead, and I have no one left on earth with whom to reminisce. I’m like an old toothless man, ruminating over all this by myself.
Poised on the far edge of the continent he teetered a bit. He cabled and telephoned France incessantly, a luxury he could ill afford. He had little desire to emigrate: “I’ve learned so many things at home that will be useless elsewhere,” he was to write later. If Madame de B thought he should return to France, he informed her, he would.
On the day he received the news of Guillaumet’s death Saint-Exupéry was scheduled to give a talk at Lisbon’s École Française. Soberly he sang the praises of the simple man who had always seemed to him the incarnation of courage, dwelling on his misadventure in the Andes, segueing into the message of Terre des hommes. He cried openly in the course of the talk; he did not neglect to mention that he was the last survivor of the airline’s early days. He pulled himself together afterward at a reception held in his honor and for the filmmaker Jean Renoir, who had also lectured, sampling a vintage port and mesmerizing with his sleight-of-hand. On December 4 he was scheduled to speak again on the subject of Aéropostale at a highly regarded engineering school. In a statement Giraudoux might have appreciated, he began by saying that he would prefer to brave a cyclone than to deliver his lecture. He went on to say that he wanted to change his subject, so as to speak about a topic with which he was preoccupied of late. “I would like to talk to you about fear,” Saint-Exupéry announced, sending an excited murmur through the audience. In an even tone the pilot went on to analyze the spectrum of his emotions under fire in a reconnaissance plane, underwater in the bay of Saint-Raphaël, under the heat of the Libyan sun. In the middle of the first ordeal he had forged what he claimed was a new definition of life: “To live is to be conscious that you are not dead, second by second, as bombs burst around you, which amounts to an extraordinary anguish.”
On December 21 he and the gray-paper parcel from which he had refused to be separated during his stay in Lisbon boarded the Siboney, a tiny boat of the American Export Lines. His neighbor turned out to be Jean Renoir, whom Saint-Exupéry had known only peripherally. Before embarking he cabled Becker, asking that he inform only Hitchcock of his imminent arrival. He wanted very much to avoid interviews.
~
Saint-Exupéry got on the Siboney as a refugee and off as a celebrity; there was no avoiding reporters, some of whom had turned up to meet Jean Renoir and settled for the other outsized Frenchman, an even better catch. Among them was a young news service correspondent who worshiped Saint-Exupéry and spoke a little French; the writer good-naturedly engaged him as a translator for an impromptu press conference at the pier. In a tweed topcoat, his hairline having crept high up on his forehead, his face creased with lines and scars, he looked particularly monumental. He gave away no secrets in ascribing France’s fall to a group of leaders who had little concept of modern war but veered away from making any political statements, refusing to offer an opinion of Pétain. He expressed his confidence that France would rise again but when pressed as to how squinted at the Manhattan skyline and answered a little bitterly, “I am not a crystal gazer.” He was more at ease describing the Siboney’s stormy crossing, which had taken two days longer than expected and proved soggy: sea water had risen through the wash basins and invaded the cabins. On board the vessel, which bore little resemblance to the Normandie, Saint-Exupéry had said he sympathized with Columbus. The ship’s captain was relieved to see Jersey City: it was now New Year’s Eve, and because of the delay the Siboney’s bars had run dry. Saint-Exupéry was no less relieved, although he spared reporters an account of the seasickness that had kept him loyal to a weeklong diet of tea and beef bouillon. For the former he had imposed on Renoir’s wife to place his order. “All you have to say is ‘tea,’ ” Didi Renoir informed him. “I don’t want to. I should rather go without,” pouted the writer, who told reporters—and doubtless believed—that his stay in the English-speaking world was to last three to four weeks. At the conclusion of the interview the young reporter impulsively asked Saint-Exupéry to autograph his interview notes. The more seasoned journalists followed suit, admitting later that they had never before done such a thing.
New York looked dazzling and wild with animation after the ashen skies and curfews of Europe. Saint-Exupéry had spent New Year’s Eve in some unusual places, but accustomed as he was to blackouts Times Square proved nearly as exotic as the Libyan desert. The city’s high spirits left him—as a party in full swing will a man in mourning—with a deep sense of malaise. He checked into the Ritz-Carlton and quickly made his first calls. With Renoir in tow he turned up on the doorstep of his old Beaux-Arts companion Bernard Lamotte, now painting in a studio on East Fifty-second Street, today La Grenouille’s upstairs dining room. Here and on his rooftop terrace Lamotte was to entertain the major and minor celebrities of the extended artistic community over the next years. Better supplied with charm than with money, he did so in bohemian splendor; Saint-Exupéry was to visit regularly, and in the odes he wrote to the refuge at Lamotte’s he generally evoked spinning heads and rotating sidewalks. Lamotte welcomed “the two mastodons” with open arms, rustling up a Sunday lunch of sardines and veal Marengo from the restaurant below, washed down over the course of the afternoon with a fair number of bottles of Byrrh. Also this first we
ekend Saint-Exupéry called on Raoul de Roussy de Sales, who found him less merry. The former Paris-Soir correspondent reported that his friend seemed “more like a bird than ever, a bird with a tendency to hide its head under its wing. He is, so to speak, weather-beaten by the war.” Saint-Exupéry was not only unhappy and at a loss for what to do; he was painfully aware that the British—up against the same miserable odds as the French had been—were still fighting a war his own country had surrendered.
What he most wanted was a minute to think, a respite, a time-out, and this America was not prepared to offer him. Two weeks after his arrival—a year late, but with one fine excuse—he collected his 1939 National Book Award at a Hotel Astor luncheon attended by 1,500 people. The press could not help but descend upon him in the days following the ceremony; perhaps because Reynal & Hitchcock laid the groundwork for him, perhaps because he was now, despite himself, on a sort of propaganda mission, Saint-Exupéry handled them with aplomb, far more at ease than he had been when the Académie Française had thrust him into the spotlight two years earlier. He made for good copy, not only on account of his derring-do: a six-foot two-inch Frenchman will stand out in any crowd. Legends of all kinds attached themselves to him, more so after his publishers volunteered that the only way to get the globe-trotting author to write was to lock him in a room; when his agent expounded on his sartorial quirks; when in the middle of an interview with Stephen Vincent Benét the pilot had to summon a Ritz waiter to turn off the electric fireplace in his room so that the two men did not roast to death. He could not himself make head or tails of the contraption. He was charming, always able in relating his adventures to make himself half hero, half clown. “He has a nice perception of the fact that conversation is not a book or a lecture; that it should be interesting,” noted an admiring Otis Ferguson, who found the Frenchman a master of timing: “You never have to wonder what his point is: it explodes.” And he was forthcoming on any subject outside of politics, volunteering that he was planning to put his other manuscript aside so as to concentrate on a book about his war experiences.
