by Stacy Schiff
Afterward, with no explanation, Saint-Exupéry would disappear. Two other obligations called—his wife, whom he liked to check up on late at night, and his work—though he told Silvia little of either of these. (When, sometime after the two had begun seeing each other, he admitted he was married, Saint-Exupéry left Silvia with the impression that his wife was mentally frail, a malingerer who had moved into Central Park South without giving him any choice in the matter.) These late-night exits drove Silvia to despair. She assumed her rivals were women and did not know that her lover returned to a hell of his own; as late as he returned to Central Park South, Consuelo got home later. He struck up a different sort of correspondence with his wife, composed of an acrid series of “Where were you?” ‘s and “Weren’t you going to stop by before you went out?” ‘s and “I thought we had a date at midnight” ‘s and “I waited for you in vain” ‘s and “Why are you so cruel?” ‘s. One evening he kept up an irate vigil, marking the time across the top of a page at ten-minute intervals, which he spent pacing. He had imagined the worst and was particularly incensed that Consuelo had so taken advantage of what he called his tenderness. With a bitter reminder to his wife that he had never come home after she did, he conceded defeat at 3:00 a.m. In an unsent letter that had plenty of counterparts but which Saint-Exupéry tore to pieces and relegated to his wastebasket (from which his secretary retrieved and reassembled it) he wrote after a missed midnight rendezvous: “You are low to hurt me like this. I don’t deserve it. Of course I am full of rancor against life. You never give me what I need.… I give everything and get nothing in exchange but hateful words.” By the end of these months of near-cohabitation he was neither bitter nor accusatory but perfectly hysterical: “When I’m dead you will know what you’ve lost.” Consuelo told people, including those she barely knew, that her husband would do anything to be rid of her, even go off and get himself killed in the war.
Those who saw the Saint-Exupérys together were not spared the sight of this strife. A housekeeper invited a guest to inspect a closet of broken furniture, victims, she claimed, of Consuelo’s rages. Bita Dobo, an assistant of Pierre Lazareff’s who had met Saint-Exupéry in California, watched a number of objects fly through the air between them. Another friend reported, optimistically, that the couple had worked out a nonaggression pact. Becker checked in on his author nearly every day and remembered the Saint-Exupérys arguing bitterly, although he also noticed that the writer suffered when apart from his wife. Indeed the tone of his letters changes instantly when the couple is separated for any length of time, complying with La Rochefoucauld’s dictum that absence will make a strong passion stronger and a weak one weaker. Robert Tenger, who was to publish Saint-Exupéry’s work in French the following year, remembered the author telling his wife, “If you’re not here I can’t think, and if you talk I can’t write.” Saint-Exupéry wore a wedding ring and invitations came addressed to Monsieur and Madame, but the writer rarely appeared in New York with Consuelo, who found comfort—but not an antidote to her jealousy—elsewhere. When the Saint-Exupérys entertained together she was late, or prone to vanish at the end of the meal. She stepped out for dinner one night in a dark blue ski suit and leopard-skin boots, a brilliant wool scarf thrown over her shoulder. Her husband asked if she might care to change; Consuelo declined. “Do you think you will look presentable?” he patiently inquired. “Oh yes,” she assured him, as they headed to a midtown bistro with a guest.
Consuelo confounded even the Americans. Her jealousy knew no bounds; she managed to go so far as to corner Saint-Exupéry’s prim English tutor in the fall, drilling her for the secret of her success with her husband (it was in fact entirely marginal), Saint-Exupéry having remarked offhandedly that he wrote better after a lesson. (The tutor did not have the courage to tell the truth, which was that she concentrated on calm before entering the couple’s turbulent household.) Galantière, who did not like Consuelo, perhaps best described her as “Surrealism made flesh”; he could not forgive her her lack of curiosity about the world, her lack of conversation. The general consensus was that she was out of her depth with her husband and to be pitied; some were better at this than others, generally depending on how entertaining they found Consuelo, who could be vastly entertaining. She told Helen Wolff, the New York publisher, of having as a child smeared her naked body with honey and run into the tropical forest in Central America, attracting butterflies, who soon dressed her in a scintillating coat. She spent a cocktail party to which she was invited by the Wolffs under a large writing desk, from which a pale arm occasionally emerged, an empty martini glass affixed to its end. Asked that winter how she had managed the priest at confession she laughed and answered quickly, “Well, I was honest. I said, ‘Mon Père, I am a daughter of Eve. What can you expect?’ ” She was on the one hand “incurably infantile,” on the other enough like her husband to complain, world-weary and sick in the 1950s, “All I ask for is someone with whom to play to distract me from all the serious, mean, and mighty people.”
All of the writer’s American tribulations came together to conspire against him in May 1942. Precipitously he flew to Montreal at the invitation of his Canadian publisher, who had reissued Wind, Sand and Stars and who had been after him for some time to visit. Saint-Exupéry asked Consuelo to join him for what he thought was to be a trip of forty-eight hours but was alone when he checked into the Hotel Windsor on April 29. He held a press conference the following day. Asked about his political views he provided a series of sincere but noncommittal answers, much to the frustration of the reporters. The press badgered him, for all the usual reasons and then some. An Amérique Française reporter made the mistake of promising the celebrity that he could vet the text of their interview. One interview turned into a series as Saint-Exupéry repeatedly asked Pierre Baillergeon to come back for the piece, with which he had not finished. In the meantime he expounded on his theory of what made a writer great: his syntax. Writing was a business of the same precision as flying, explained Saint-Exupéry, demonstrating how language, too, “amounted to a sophisticated machine, very scientific, where one word too many—like a grain of sand or the slightest clumsiness, like an incorrect maneuver—could result in a crash.” He had plenty of time to expand on these themes, to share with Baillergeon his draft of a preface to Les Fleurs du Mal that had been commissioned but that never saw the light of day. On his arrival in Montreal he discovered that his visa was not, as he had been promised it would be, in proper order, and that he was barred from reentry into the United States. He was advised to reconcile himself to a six-month stay.
The Reynals were the first to hear of the writer’s plight. Well acquainted with his gift for the practical, their reaction was a weary “Oh, my God, he’s done it again.” Saint-Exupéry concluded—based on evidence that, if it existed, is lost today—that he was the victim of a Gaullist plot. He had been assured that his papers would be arranged for him by a Canadian embassy official in Washington who had even insisted a little on the trip, which Saint-Exupéry had repeatedly put off. His Montreal publisher felt—either for his own reasons or because he was encouraged to do so by Saint-Exupéry—that the Washington Gaullists had denounced him to keep him trapped in Canada. This was possible but unlikely, as the writer’s visa trouble was with the Americans, and de Gaulle’s word carried little weight in Washington in mid-1942. What seems most likely is that he was allowed into Canada without the requisite papers—he left in a hurry and before his U.S. exit permit was officially registered, on the embassy official’s assurance that all could be arranged in Montreal—and that the wheels of bureaucracy had to grind a bit to catch up with him. This explanation was too pedestrian for Saint-Exupéry, who, in letter after letter, phone call after phone call, sputtered that his Canadian stay amounted to a Chinese water torture. He had plenty of time to vent his spleen, which he directed at his American publishers, whom he essentially ordered to get him out of Canada. The day after the author’s arrival in Montreal Curtice Hitchcock
wrote the U.S. State Department to vouch for him: a best-selling writer with a monthly income of well in excess of $1,000, he was “in no danger whatsoever of becoming a public charge.”
As the forty-eight hours melted into five weeks Saint-Exupéry grew increasingly petulant. Once again he waged a battle—this time across a friendly border that suddenly loomed grotesquely high—to make himself understood. He knew he was behaving badly but could not help himself, given the stupidity of the situation. In a ten-page letter he explained to Hitchcock that his calls to Elizabeth Reynal had been trying; she had persisted in treating him like a five-year-old. It was important to him that his publisher know he was neither ungrateful nor an idiot. Over and over he rehashed the history of the trip: “If I insist on the details it’s because I cannot bear for you to think that the grave concerns and the trouble I have caused you might in any way be due to my thoughtlessness.” It is easy to take a measure of his insistence; it drove the equanimous Elizabeth to lose her patience. She was furious with the writer for passing off the blame on everyone else. Regardless of the promises made him by the embassy he had been irresponsible in leaving without papers. As for the State Department, she reminded Saint-Exupéry, “It has other things to do than to worry about you. It’s waging a war. You’re best off going to bed.” By the end of May she had nothing but reproaches for him when all he wanted—aside from an American visa—was sympathy.
He had long since given the lectures he had been asked to deliver, of which he acquitted himself with his usual relish. Speaking on his war experiences and on France’s need for unity, he won over his Montreal audience on May 2 not with eloquence but with shyness and sincerity. He was ill at ease on the dais, correcting his first sentence three times before launching into the rest of his talk; he was now more than ever careful with his words. On May 4, by which time it was clear to him he was going nowhere soon, he spoke in Quebec City, at the Institut Canadien, to a packed auditorium. Over the next weeks he saw a good deal of his Canadian publisher, whom he held responsible for his predicament, but spent most of his time in his room at the Windsor, much of it brooding over his visa trouble. Several times he visited with Philippe Roy, an army officer who was the son of the former Canadian minister to France, as well as with Roy’s friends and family, who found their guest so charming they were doubtless little tempted to help him return to America. In a stylish Montreal restaurant one night with Roy and his future wife, Katherine Ethier, Saint-Exupéry proceeded to pull the tablecloth out from under four place settings without disturbing a single piece of silver or stemware. The Café Martin’s waiters were astonished. So were the children to whom Saint-Exupéry was introduced in Montreal, for whom he performed the better part of his repertoire. He let a deck of cards fly all over Katherine Ethier’s living room then excused himself, inviting her family to choose a card and replace it. On his return he correctly identified each of their choices.
On Hotel Windsor letterhead he wrote tenderly to both Natalie and Silvia, promising his newer friend that he would come to see her as soon as he returned to “the promised land.” She thought he had left for two days and when he was not back dispatched a private detective to track him down. Nor was she the only woman combing the eastern seaboard for the hulking aviator. One sizzling hot afternoon in early June Katherine Ethier’s maid came to find her to announce a visitor. Ethier was in the final stages of moving house; she went downstairs to find Consuelo in a floor-length mink in the empty living room. Had anyone seen her husband? She claimed she was to have met him for a cocktail party at this address, which she had probably misunderstood. She and the coat left in a taxi, to general consternation. To make matters worse Saint-Exupéry suffered toward the middle of his stay from a series of painful spasms that he attributed to an inflamed gallbladder, an infection for which he had been hospitalized in New York.* He was forced to consult a Montreal doctor, who took one look at him and diagnosed the problem, confirming the patient’s belief that science was as often a detriment to medicine as to aviation. The man who had walked out of the Libyan desert spent two sleepless weeks in bed with an icepack on his stomach, subsisting entirely on a diet of belladonna. “It makes you a bit stupid,” he wrote, twice exiled, to Hitchcock. “Odd planet, odd problems, odd language. Maybe there is a star where life is simple,” he wrote Natalie at about this time, Consuelo having opened a telegram from his lover.
~
Out of these labors came The Little Prince. The book was proposed as a sort of therapy; Saint-Exupéry returned to New York in June 1942 with no immediate project. Once again Elizabeth Reynal came to the rescue. In the margins of the manuscript pages of Flight to Arras danced the little figure Saint-Exupéry had been drawing—on letters, dedication pages, in the midst of mathematical equations, over restaurant tablecloths—since the mid-1950s. Well attuned to the author’s despair Elizabeth asked if he might not be distracted by writing a children’s story about his “petit bonhomme.” She may have put forth the idea vaguely at dinner one night, when Saint-Exupéry’s only response to it was a long look, or she may have mentioned it to her husband, who relayed it to the author over lunch. (Reynal & Hitchcock enjoyed a phenomenal success at the time with P. L. Travers’s Mary Poppins books.) A great many people remember having offered Saint-Exupéry paint sets in 1941 or 1942 and may well have done so, but he began the book, very much on whim, with a set of children’s watercolors he bought himself in an Eighth Avenue drugstore.
Saint-Exupéry wrote and drew The Little Prince that summer and fall in his usual distracted manner, in long, late-night bursts of energy fueled by coffee, Coca-Cola, and cigarettes, generous traces of which show up on the manuscript. He wrote with a different series of pens and pencils and edited and crumpled and scribbled in margins. He painted on the wrong side of the onionskin. Galantière was to say that he tore up one hundred pages for every one he sent to the printer, and he was if anything more exacting of this slim text. Saint-Exupéry had told a reporter that the most difficult thing about writing was beginning but did not seem to have had this difficulty with The Little Prince, the plot of which emerged fullblown. The illustrations were more problematic. The author had particular trouble with the Little Prince’s baobab trees, arriving finally at a satisfactory result only by turning his drawing 120 degrees and beginning again. He was proud enough of the result to boast of it a little in the text. The Little Prince’s wardrobe went through a number of transformations, as it does in the finished book. Certain decisions were easy: “Kings always wear ermine,” the author explained to a visitor in the fall with a knowing smile. He did not settle immediately on the boa digesting the elephant which opens the tale. Originally he offered as proof of his lack of artistic abilities a drawing of a boat, which he claimed a friend took for a potato.
Silvia Reinhardt lent the fox—really a fennec, from Cape Juby—his most memorable speech after she complained to Saint-Exupéry of the pain his tardiness caused her. What difference can it make, protested the author, who evidently for some incidental purpose wore a watch. “My heart begins to dance when I know you are coming,” explained Silvia. He settled down to write in her living room; she nursed him through the project with gin-and-Cokes, and with fried eggs and English muffins served by candlelight. A doll in her apartment posed as the Little Prince, giving him a mop of golden curls. (In previous incarnations, the Little Prince’s hair was, like the writer’s, thinning.) Mocha the poodle modeled for the sheep; a boxer Silvia bought for Saint-Exupéry in August—she thought he needed a pet, and he christened this one “Hannibal”—became the tiger. She listened to Saint-Exupéry chuckle and chortle his way through the manuscript, which it did not seem to her that he took altogether seriously but which clearly represented one of the few solaces he would know in America, a judgment echoed by his secretary. At all times Silvia encouraged him with the project; later he wrote her that she had understood him better than those who had had the benefit of language. “Words,” counsels the Little Prince’s fox, “are the sourc
e of misunderstandings.” It is altogether appropriate that the book’s most quoted line—“What is essential is invisible to the eye,” a line that caused Saint-Exupéry a great deal of trouble although he had been turning out versions of it for five years—should be spoken by the fox.
Silvia Reinhardt and Elizabeth Reynal were not the only women who left their marks on the book, a tenderhearted one in which no women appear. It was hotter in Manhattan in July than Saint-Exupéry could bear, and—after a few weekends as a house guest on Long Island with the Reynals and the Roussy de Saleses—he dispatched Consuelo to locate a summer home. He turned out the remainder of the book’s pages in a twenty-two-room mansard-roofed mansion in Asharoken, overlooking Long Island Sound, a house about which he groused, “I wanted a hut and it’s the Palace of Versailles.” The Revin House was, nonetheless, the best place he had had to work since Agay, which it resembled, to the extent that the north shore of Long Island can resemble the Riviera. The Saint-Exupérys’ was not a quiet household, and to its chaos was added a steady stream of celebrity visitors. André Maurois spent a weekend at the Bevin House in the fall and did not find his stay restful. Saint-Exupéry kept to his usual schedule and thought nothing of summoning his guests at any time to show off a drawing of which he was particularly proud. He did not hesitate to awaken Consuelo—and with her the entire household—at two in the morning to announce he was hungry and in dire need of a plate of scrambled eggs. In another two hours everyone might be aroused again when, from the foot of the stairs, he demanded that his wife come down and indulge him in a game of chess. When the writer was not exhausting the house guests his wife was, with enchanting tales of Oppède; Maurois felt afterward as if he had been in the clutches of two sorcerers. The Swiss writer Denis de Rougemont made the two-hour trip to the Long Island home regularly, less at the invitation of Saint-Exupéry than of Consuelo. Posing on his stomach, feet in the air, for the Little Prince, he watched Saint-Exupéry manipulate his tiny paintbrushes with fierce concentration, his tongue glued to his upper lip. After a late-night reading from The Wisdom of the Sands de Rougemont would stumble to his room, only to find that his host had followed him, eager to talk and smoke some more. He took away from these weekends the impression of a mind that could not be switched off. He became a neighbor of the Saint-Exupérys when both men moved to Reekman Place in New York in December. De Rougemont claimed he never afterward got a full night’s sleep. “You are less a couple than a full-time conspiracy against your friends’ sleep,” he informed them.
