by Stacy Schiff
Having thus far resisted all of Reynal and Hitchcock’s efforts to see that he learn English, Saint-Exupéry submitted in Asharoken to a series of tutorials with a well-intentioned young Northport French teacher named Adèle Rreaux. She had originally approached Consuelo about English lessons; Consuelo fobbed her off on her husband. He did not have the courage to send her away but proved a difficult conquest. “Mademoiselle, I am a very busy man.… I have very little time to give to English. I don’t care whether I ever speak it easily. As a matter of fact, I don’t wish to know it too well; I want no other language to impinge on my own.… Furthermore, don’t count on me to study!” he informed her at the outset of their first session in September. He warmed up only a few lessons later, when the generally circumspect Rreaux—initiating her student into the mysteries of the negative in the English language—produced the statement “All children do not love their parents.” For the first time she saw the writer’s face light up. “Ah, Mademoiselle, do you realize that you have just enunciated an immoral statement?” he boomed, collapsing in laughter over her discomfort. Inadvertently she had allied herself with the irreverence of the Little Prince; from this day on Rreaux was a welcome visitor in the house. She found this honor carried with it certain obligations: Saint-Exupéry was as ever on the lookout for people to tend to his wife, and twice prevailed upon Rreaux to dine with her in his absence. He used the same words—and no one was quite as scrupulous in setting down Saint-Exupéry’s as Adèle Rreaux, who kept a flashlight in her car and furiously recorded everything the great man had said by the side of Revin Road upon leaving him—on both occasions: “She does not like to be left alone.”
The Oregon-born Rreaux, in whom substance triumphed over style, did not find these the most cordial dinners of her life. Although she took no offense, she was treated with prickly condescension. She heard a good deal about Consuelo’s travails in getting her husband’s attention, about what Saint-Exupéry admired in a woman. She learned about Consuelo’s idea for a book, based on her experiences at Oppède, a project that was clearly earning little support from the author of Flight to Arras, who had forbidden his wife to publish under her married name. (Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry’s Kingdom of the Rocks was brought out by Random House two years after her husband’s death. Its reviews as much described the woman Breaux met that summer as they did the work in question: “It is irritating only because it is so constantly on the verge of being good,” noted Albert Guérard, the Times reviewer. “There are times when she seems a little fey, a little over-poetic and romantic but she is never dull,” wrote another. She reminded Guérard of Rostand, not at his best, of Bernhardt, in her decline.) Breaux was treated to an intimate view of the marriage but—she had not yet read The Little Prince—did not recognize the rose. While Consuelo was not, as has been claimed, responsible for the volume’s drawing, she was in part responsible for the story’s whimsical atmosphere. She did not provide her husband with a healthy climate but always assured a fertile one; nothing, in her hands, was or remained prosaic. Her asthma bothered her in New York; she was as sensitive to the air around her as the Prince’s globe-protected flower. Like the rose she hid her half-truths with a troubling cough. Few people familiar with the text of The Little Prince would have boasted of being the inspiration for the rose, a distinction on a par with having served as the model for Charles Bovary. Consuelo did not hesitate to do so.
She tried unsuccessfully that fall to claim and hold her husband’s attention, confiding in Breaux that she felt lonely and abandoned. (In Breaux’s opinion the writer was not himself much better off; he appeared, she said later, “never to really seem anchored, in spite of the many friends. What a lonely individual, and how greatly his marriage added to that.”) Saint-Exupéry, however, had eyes mostly for France. As the year wore on he stepped up his assaults on Washington. Early in April Jean Monnet, who had come to the United States as a representative of the French government but whom Churchill had appointed to the British Supply Council after the débâcle, had arranged for Saint-Exupéry to meet with the American General Staff. On the eighth he attended a meeting in the Munitions Building, probably to discuss the inventions he had mentioned to the government earlier. A week later Henri Giraud, the French general who had commanded the principal sector of the Maginot Line, made a miraculous escape from a German prison. Overjoyed, Saint-Exupéry devised an intricate scheme to unite Giraud and the Americans, themselves delighted to be presented with an alternative to de Gaulle. The writer outlined his scheme to Galantière: the United States would transport him to North Africa, from which he could make his way to France. There he would secure an airplane and fly Giraud to an American ship, which would convey the general to Washington. Giraud and the Combined Chiefs of Staff could work out the details for a North African invasion, Giraud being the only French officer behind whom the troops in North Africa were likely to rally. Galantière was enough taken with this immodest proposal to present it, in July, to two Washington friends, one from the OSS and the other from the Combined Chiefs. It was dismissed as “a grotesque pipe dream,” and Galantière was severely rebuffed. “My friend Saint-Exupéry might perhaps be a genius, but he was certainly a complete idiot,” Galantière remembered having been informed. Furthermore, if either he or his friend should breathe a word of their hair-brained idea to anyone they could look forward to twelve years in a federal penitentiary.
It was in this way that Saint-Exupéry and Galantière learned, earlier than most, of Operation Torch. “So that’s how it is! They’re cleverer than I had imagined,” was the writer’s reaction to the uproar his translator had caused in Washington. (Before the landings Giraud was smuggled out of France to meet with General Eisenhower in Gibraltar. His code name during Operation Torch was “Kingpin.”) Saint-Exupéry told a few friends, discreetly, that he made regular trips to Washington, at which he offered up his knowledge of the geography of North Africa, its airports and installations, but there is no evidence that he actually did so, at least in a formal capacity. Even if he was not in touch with the U.S. government the government kept in touch with him: the State Department regularly monitored his sympathies, listening in on his telephone calls and soliciting reports on his dinner table conversations, a task that was presumably facilitated by his friendship with William J. Donovan, with whom Saint-Exupéry remained in touch at least periodically. Through the fall and the early winter he did commute between Silvia’s apartment in New York and the house on Long Island, making precipitous departures and unannounced arrivals at both ends, where he was greeted and waved off with torrents of tears.
He responded to these crises with a correspondence suffused with the imagery of The Little Prince. Generally as 1942 wore on his letters to Silvia devolved into a litany of explanations and his letters to Consuelo into those of recriminations. On both fronts he pleaded for understanding. To Silvia he wrote:
I am more devoted to you than you think. This is not obvious because of the difficulties I have with love; this is my mystery, and a very tiring one. Love doesn’t give me a voice; it silences me. It does not free me; it locks me up. And yet I cannot live without it.… I get terribly confused in love. I disappoint and am contradictory. But tenderness and friendship, once instilled in me, never perish. Little Sylvia [sic], I am a poor sailor. I cannot offer you a smooth trip; I don’t know where I am headed. All your reproaches, without exception, are merited. And yet my tenderness for you is extreme. When I rest my hand on your forehead I would like to fill you with stars.…
To Consuelo he wrote: “I am so alone, so lost, so bitter.” His wife was “an odd kind of desert.” When not attempting to explain away his erratic behavior he extolled Silvia’s unaffected charms. This he did in perfect Little Prince—like metaphors, comparing her to an expanse of unremarkable countryside, one where the grass is green and the water fresh, where the exotic blossoms do not clamor for attention, do not demand to be admired as if in an exhibition.
He had the complicated man’s lov
e of the simple; he seemed to have realized he had married an orchid when he wanted a daisy. Even his letters to friends smacked of the themes of The Little Prince. Evidently to thank Lamotte for the drawings he had contributed to Arras he scribbled an eloquent two-page tribute to the artist. A scraggly willow that Lamotte had potted on his rooftop terrace allowed him the opportunity to expound on one of his favorite themes. Lamotte doted on the spindly tree, which was neither lush nor sturdy, and which did not last long in midtown Manhattan. “We never know if the owner of a $1,000 greyhound likes dogs, but of the man who invites in a mongrel we can be more sure,” wrote Saint-Exupéry, noting the care Lamotte took to chase birds from the tiny willow, for fear they would damage its branches.
~
The Little Prince’s adventures seem exotic: he is a cosmic urchin who leaves his asteroid because of a misunderstanding with a troublesome rose; he makes a speedy survey of adult logic in six visits to neighboring asteroids, each populated by a man more ridiculous than the last; he lands in the Sahara, where he meets the aviator who serves as the book’s narrator; and he learns a few crucial lessons from a fox before disappearing into thin air. The book hardly represented a departure for Saint-Exupéry, however, whose first novel had consisted of equal parts flight and failed love and who had been writing of secret gardens and roses and fairy princes ever since. The Wisdom of the Sands, meant to be a philosophical meditation, part Old Testament and part Pascal, shares all the preoccupations of the children’s book. An airplane Bernis flies in Southern Mail bears the same number as does the Little Prince’s asteroid, B-612.* The worst insult the Little Prince can hurl at a man is the same with which the author berated the complacent when in his twenties: such men are “mushrooms.” In Moscow the author had—in a context about as sensible as that in which the Little Prince poses the same question—asked a diplomat friend to draw him a sheep on the corner of a table. He confessed to Adèle Breaux that the boa swallowing the elephant resembled a sketch he had made as a child. He had himself fallen to earth countless times; he had written from the start of interplanetary space. A man of broad horizons, he had spoken about planets—of changing planets, of his luck in having landed on the same one as the Werths, given the size of the solar system—for several years. He had dreamed of escape for even longer.
The landscape of Saint-Exupéry’s travels became his hero’s: the volcanoes come from Patagonia, the baobabs from Dakar. Of all the places he lived, only New York is absent from the book, having been excised in an early draft in a reference Saint-Exupéry appears to have thought too parochial. (It was replaced by “a small Pacific islet.”) He had a Frenchman’s attachment to the earth, of which he never owned a piece; gardening remained for him an emblem of integrity in an increasingly complicated world. (The Little Prince originally presided over a full-scale vegetable garden.) Pastoral metaphors proliferate in his work, as does the image born in Nouakchott of his twin obsessions—with the earth, and with the human duty to cultivate—of a man tending a frail and isolated plant in an inhospitable place. In addition to the tribute to Lamotte, he had worked the image into three books, three articles, countless letters, and a screenplay. The supporting cast of The Little Prince also traveled around with him for years: the relatives, administrators, and bureaucrats who had resisted his winning and unorthodox ways, who had made it difficult for an aristocrat to become a pilot, for a pilot to become a writer, for a distracted pilot to remain in the air, for a prominent pilot to abstain from taking a political stance. It took the war, and a mountain of personal problems, to bring them all together in a book.
In early incarnations the Little Prince resembles a Kewpie doll, a baby puffin, or R. Crumb’s rumpled Keep-On-Truckin’ figure. One early Little Prince, not yet shorn of his eyebrows, looks like the French actor Jean-Louis Barrault. Occasionally in 1940 these ancestors sported wings which—like Saint-Exupéry—they lost with the fall of France. When the writer was asked later how the child-hero had entered his life, he said he had looked down on what he had thought was a blank sheet of paper to find a tiny figure. “I asked him who he was,” he explained. “I’m the Little Prince,” came the reply. How much did Saint-Exupéry resemble his hero? “You are an extraterrestrial,” Aglion informed him one day, before he had yet read the book. “Yes, yes, it is true, I sometimes go for walks among the stars,” admitted Saint-Exupéry, who made several sketches of the aviator-narrator but chose not to include any of them in the text. (He is as much that narrator—who has “lived his life alone, without anyone that I could really talk to”—as the Prince, who cries, “Be my friends, I am all alone” from a desolate mountaintop, to hear only his own echo.) His gestures, Hedda Sterne remembers, were entirely those of the Prince. Others said the same of his speech patterns. He was as inquisitive as his hero but better at answering questions. In an early draft of the manuscript, poking fun at his fame, he wrote that his opinion has been solicited on a great number of subjects; while he did not in fact have strong feelings on such weighty matters as neckties, he had never dared admit as much to a journalist. The tone of the Little Prince’s voice was very much that of the man who had informed a woman who shuddered at the thought of boarding an airplane, “It is without precedent, Madame, that an airplane has gone up and not come down”; Saint-Exupéry’s charm consisted too of equal parts awkwardness and intimidation. When he grew unhappier still he used the figure to illustrate his despair. For Silvia he sketched a captioned series of Little Princes, wedged in crevices, marooned in bleak landscapes, perched atop craggy cliffs. To Hedda Sterne—for whom he had waited in vain through a despondent afternoon—he sent a Little Prince wading in text: “If I knew how to write letters I would write you a long one, but four or five years ago I turned into an idiot and I no longer know how to communicate very well. I detest myself.” In Algiers in 1943 he drew the figure for Madame de B—in prison, in the company of a spider he has tamed. He offered up the book there proudly, boyishly, the autobiography of an innocent abroad, handing it over as if he were offering up his photograph.
Saint-Exupéry’s was the brand of purity possessed by two sorts of people: children and monks. He had plenty of faith but little investment in religion; between the dismal days in which he wrote The Little Prince and the more dismal days that followed he was to regret this. He said repeatedly that if only he had religion he would retire to a monastery, usually harking back to Solesmes, where he had been so taken by the Gregorian chants. In his habits he seemed ill-suited for such an existence, but in his last years especially he appeared a man with a stubborn faith in search of a place in which to invest it. Publicly he clung always, on all levels, to a dignified idealism. In 1939 Joseph Kessel asked him derisively why he contributed to second-rate publications like Paris-Soir. Saint-Exupéry responded without any trace of irritation that if other talented writers were to do the same Paris-Soir would no longer be a second-rate publication. (Faced some time earlier with a variation on the same question, Theodore Dreiser shrugged, “One must live,” which was of course the operative answer as well for Saint-Exupéry, who admitted elsewhere that he could not so much as bring himself to read Paris-Soir.) Through the trials of the early 1940s he remained, for all his despair, indomitable, unwaveringly faithful in the manner a psychologist might identify as that of the puer aeternus, what a layman might term unrealistic. He assured a woman friend that while Consuelo tormented him she did not do so maliciously or even intentionally. He never relinquished hope that he might one day reform her, that he might save her from herself. He described his wife to one lover as his cross to bear; his last communications to her are the most adoring of love letters.
No one who met Saint-Exupéry the adult ever forgot him, but the children of his friends and colleagues—with whom, outside of language, politics, and the emotional, he was entirely at ease—preserve the most vivid memories of him. They remember him at the height of his powers, experimenting with a sort of thick green soup in his Central Park South bathtub, filling the sky outsid
e of his apartment with fleets of paper airplanes, tossing water bombs out over Gramercy Park, blowing pumpkin-sized glycerine bubbles with a rolled-up newspaper, setting Hannibal and a tube of toothpaste loose on the luscious carpets of Beekman Place, offering teenage girls lessons in deportment, fabricating helicopters out of maple seeds and hairpins. He rarely hesitated to draw cousins of the Little Prince for the children he met and went so far as to promise René Gavoille’s daughter a work on the Little Princess. As children will, he understood what he was to describe in The Wisdom of the Sands as the difference between the urgent and the important. While writing The Little Prince he called Hélène Lazareff, then the assistant women’s editor at The New York Times, to ask how many stars were in the sky. (His businessman is engrossed in counting them when the Prince arrives.) Hélène passed the question on to her assistant, Dorothy Barclay, who called the Hayden Planetarium on the author’s behalf. She did not succeed in her mission, but her effort was well-rewarded. Her copy of The Little Prince bears an extra prince. “You would have to be crazy to choose this planet. It is agreeable only at night, when its inhabitants are asleep,” announces the little figure on the half-title page. Underneath him Saint-Exupéry scrawled: “The Little Prince was wrong. There are on earth those whose integrity, kindness, and generosity make up for the greed and the selfishness of others. For example, Dorothy Barclay.” For days after the book was sent to Barclay its author hounded Lazareff. What had her assistant thought? Had she liked his drawing?
