Saint-exupery: A Biography

by Stacy Schiff

  66. “Covering himself” and “The North Star”: Mossé, 198–99.

  67. “a little nothing”: LSM, 194.

  68. “At times like these”: LSM, 194.

  69. “I have never”: LSM, 196.

  70. SE’s caravan rescue became the stuff of lore; among others, Fleury (La Ligne) and Kessel (Vent de sable) reported on it. His official report, on which I have relied heavily, is dated August 1, 1928, and reproduced in Icare I, 173ff.

  71. “I folded this paper,” “technically perfect,” and “Don’t reproach me”: SE’s private report to Tête, July 26, 1928, quoted by Raymond Vanier in Icare I, 175.

  72. “Saint-Exupéry was never”: Lefèbvre, from Mossé, 121.

  73. The best account of SE’s rogue rescue attempt is that of Paul Nubalde, Icare I, 184.

  74. “irregular conduct”: Quoted in Pierre Chevrier, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), 62.

  75. “who had been carried away”: Archives of the Musée Air France, D39.

  76. “where one politely”: LSM, 196.

  77. “It may be”: LSM, 196.

  78. “Two Spanish planes”: Albert Tête’s official report, quoted in Icare I, op. cit., 181.

  79. “One does not pacify”: SE’s report on the Río de Oro is reproduced in its entirety in René Delange, La vie de Saint-Exupéry (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1949), 189–99.

  80. “with a lifting motion”: Otis Ferguson, Common Sense, May 1941, 132. Ferguson’s little-known piece provides one of the supreme portraits of SE the awkward, unwilling celebrity.

  81. “I am decidedly”: LSM, 198.

  82. “where 200 men”: LSM, 192.

  83. “is more mysterious”: LSM, 208.

  84. “Somewhere there was a park”: WSS, 65. SE first published this account under the title “Un Mirage” in the Surrealist journal Minotaure, Winter 1935, 19.

  II THE MOTHER COUNTRY

  1. For the histories of the Saint-Exupéry and Boyer de Fonscolombe families I am tremendously grateful to Frédéric d’Agay.

  2. In one of the rare lines: EG, 584.

  3. “marvelous gaiety”: From an interview conducted by Helen Elizabeth Crane with Amici de Saint-Exupéry Churchill, included in Crane, L’Humanisme dans l’oeuvre de Saint-Exupéry (Evanston, Ill.: Principia Press, 1957), 245.

  4. For SE’s birth certificate I am again indebted to Frédéric d’Agay, who also provided information on the birth dates of Saint-Exupéry’s siblings and on the château of Saint-Maurice and the Château de La Mole. I am grateful as well to Maggy Herzog, from the Caisse des Écoles de la ville de Lyons, for having graciously shown me around Saint-Maurice-de-Rémens. Simone de Saint-Exupéry wrote more on the Saint-Maurice years than did any of her siblings, including her better-known brother; Frédéric d’Agay kindly shared her unpublished manuscript, Cinq enfants dans un parc. I have relied heavily on her descriptions of her brother’s antics. On Madame de Saint-Exupéry, see also Olga Baget, “Marie de Saint-Exupéry,” Les cahiers bourbonnais, 2ème trimestre, 1978.

  5. The family was no sooner complete: La Croix du Littoral, March 20, 1904.

  6. a very private anxiety: In 1923 SE wrote his mother (ANAT) that—in light of heredity—he felt he had best submit to a Wassermann test before what he thought were to be his imminent nuptials. A close friend who has asked not to be identified confided in an interview on December 4, 1991, that SE submitted to these tests regularly and repeatedly insisted on SE’s obsession with the subject. SE also told that friend that he should like to have a child with a desert woman, whom he would not worry about infecting with the syphilis of which he feared he was a carrier; he knew that venereal syphilis (actually bejel) was prevalent in North Africa.

  7. “He followed me”: Cited in Françoise de Quercize, “Saint-Exupéry raconté par les témoins de sa vie,” Marie-France, May 1965, 129. SE makes mention of the little green chair himself in LSM, 128.

  8. from the age of six: SE, “Books I Remember,” Harper’s Razaar, April 1941, 82.

  9. accomplished metteurs en scène: From Crane’s interview with Charlotte Churchill, L’Humanisme dans l’oeuvre de Saint-Exupéry, 250.

  10. “When you are awakened”: Cited in Quercize, Marie-France, May 1965, 129.

  11. “Enough, Tonio”: Simone de Saint-Exupéry, “Antoine, Mon Frère,” Lettres Françaises, December 12, 1963, 3.

  12. “Antoine is extraordinarily”: From Simone de Saint-Exupéry’s unpublished Cinq enfants dans un parc.

  13. “The bizarre object”: Simone de Saint-Exupéry, Icare I, 59.

  14. to take to the air: Odette de Sinéty, “Quand Saint-Exupéry jouait au Petit-Prince dans la Sarthe,” Le Maine Libre, July 29, 1982.

  15. “You would say”: WSS, 66. For Simone’s version, in which her brother more accurately tortures the housekeeper with his tales, see Cinq enfants dans un parc.

  16. A village child: Annette Flamand described her childhood memories of SE to Howard Scherry, who kindly lent me a tape of their conversation of July 18, 1989.

  17. On the succession of SE family pets, see Simone de Saint-Exupéry, Lettres Françaises, December 12, 1963, and Simone de Saint-Exupéry, Les Nouvelles Littéraires, July 29, 1954.

  18. “He often asked me”: Cahiers Saint-Exupéry II, Association des Amis de Saint-Exupéry, Gallimard, 1981, 37.

  19. His appetite seemed: Chevrier, 2.

  20. The story of the offending green beans comes from a conversation with Madame de B, January 22, 1991.

  21. refused the job: Simone de Saint-Exupéry’s “Antoine mon frère” in Saint-Exupéry (Paris: Hachette, 1963), 59.

  22. “an infinite gentleness” and “He was a first-rate devil”: From Crane’s interview with Amici de Saint-Exupéry Churchill, Crane, 243.

  23. “Mother, you leaned”: LSM, 209.

  24. “Antoine was talented”: Mme. de Saint-Exupéry noted that Simone in fact appeared the most intellectual of her children in her interview with Crane, op. cit., 240.

  25. “profound musical ambiance” and “The house resonated”: From André de Fonscolombe’s recollections of his cousin’s childhood home in Cahiers de l’Aéro-Club de France, June 1991, 20–21; also in an interview with the author, January 21, 1991.

  26. “What a family”: LSM, 201.

  27. “What? This man”: Marie de Saint-Exupéry, J’écoute chanter mon arbre, Gallimard, Paris, 1967, 39.

  28. “She sent delightful”: From Crane’s interview with Alix Churchill, Crane, 246.

  29. The visit with the Countess du Mesnil du Buisson was written up by her son, R. du Mesnil du Buisson: “Antoine de Saint-Exupéry au pays d’Argentan,” Le Pays d’Argentan, September 1955, 75–77.

  30. “a respect for the real” and “As in truth”: Chevrier, 16.

  31. “noisy, vulgar”: Simone de Saint-Exupéry, Cinq enfants dans un parc.

  32. “My two brothers”: Simone de Saint-Exupéry, Lettres Françaises, December 12, 1963, 3.

  33. SE’s recollections of his uncle Hubert can be found in FA, 344–45.

  34. “Both, being from the South”: Crane interview with Charlotte Churchill, Crane, 250.

  35. “was like the reign”: Mme. de Saint-Exupéry, cited in Chevrier, 25.

  36. “I have lived”: LP, 5 (translation mine). As an adult SE was to remark, “J’ai une famille qui est tout à fait végétative” (interview with a friend who has asked not to be identified, December 17, 1991), although it should be said that any family—in fact the very concept of family—would have seemed “vegetative” to SE.

  37. “The life of Antoine”: Simone de SE, Lettres Françaises, December 12, 1963, 1.

  38. “house without secrets”: WSS, 70–71.

  39. “When we were ten”: CS, 94.

  40. “It is of you I think”: ANAT.

  41. “What taught me”: LSM, 209.

  42. “Once you are a man”: FA, 380.

  43. “like the tides”: FA, 345.

  44. “the little
stove”: LSM, 208.

  45. “You must be like”: SE to Consuelo, 1939–40, ANAT.

  46. “This world of childhood” and “I am not sure”: LSM, 208–209.

  47. “There is one thing”: I am grateful to Jean Bénech for having shared with me the writings of his father, Captain Pierre Bénech, who remembered this incident.

  III THINGS IN HEAVEN AND EARTH

  1. A vestige of Le Mans: I am inestimably grateful to Frédéric d’Agay for this observation (disputed by some) and for much of the background regarding SE’s paternal grandfather.

  2. Mont Saint-Barthélmy: Mme. de Saint-Exupéry told her son’s first biographer, Pierre Chevrier, of this early education, of which no record exists.

  3. “Tatane”: For this nickname and a sense of Notre-Dame-de-Sainte-Croix I have relied heavily on the recollections of Jean-Marie Lelièvre, Icare I, 73–77. SE’s academic record comes from the school.

  4. “in no way”: Simone de Saint-Exupéry, in Saint-Exupéry (Hachette), op. cit., 58.

  5. “incapable of sitting”: Chevrier, 22.

  6. “dreamy and meditative”: Letter from the Abbé Vérité to Crane, published in Crane, op. cit., 255.

  7. “off in space”: Again, the descriptions are from Lelièvre, Icare I, 73–77.

  8. On Solesmes, LSM, 37.

  9. “he made us read”: Lelièvre never forgot the reception that greeted “Odyssey of a Hat.” See Icare I, op. cit., 74.

  10. “lived in peace and quiet” and all other quotations from “Odyssey of a Hat”: SE’s early masterpiece has been reproduced frequently. It can most easily be found in Crane, op. cit., 257–58 (translation mine).

  11. “Far too many spelling”: 1984 Archives Nationales exhibit catalogue, 5.

  12. “for his escape”: LP, 38.

  13. “wrote poems, tragedies” to “more or less like a bear”: Odette de Sinéty’s recollections of the courtship are from Le Maine Libre, op. cit., July 29, 1982. I am grateful to Roland de Belabre for having shared SE’s poetic tributes to his aunt.

  14. “hands as dirty” and the general report on SE’s clumsiness: Lelièvre in Icare I, op. cit., 73–77.

  15. “He flies!”: Curtis Prendergast, The First Aviators (New York: Time-Life Books, 1980), 34.

  16. “acrobat” and “four-flusher”: Reports of the French press’s skepticism about Wright are cited in Fred Howard, Wilbur and Orville Wright (New York: Knopf, 1987). Reports of their about-face are cited in Charles H. Gibbs-Smith, The Aeroplane (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1960), 62–63. See also Orville Wright, How We Invented the Airplane (New York: David McKay Company, 1953).

  17. “A new era”: Blériot is quoted in Howard, 258.

  18. “We are beaten”: ibid., 262.

  19. “You never saw anything”: Wilbur Wright to Orville, cited in Howard, 263.

  20. Wilbur Wright’s letter to his brother regarding Chanute’s Aéro-Club de France speech dates from June 28, 1908 and appears in Marvin W. McFarland, éd., The Papers of Wilbur and Orville Wright, II (New York: Arno Press, 1972).

  21. For a sense of the early days of the Aéro-Club de France, and for a general sense of early aviation in France, see Edmond Petit, La vie quotidienne dans l’aviation de 1900 à 1935 (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1977).

  22. I owe the observation regarding high-quality, small-scale production and the aviation industry to Herrick Chapman, State Capitalism and Working Class Radicalism in the French Aircraft Industry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

  23. Both Fred Howard and Tom D. Crouch (The Bishop’s Boys, Norton, 1989) provide ample accounts of the Wright brothers’ difficulty in selling the Flyer. So does Orville Wright in How We Invented the Airplane, op. cit.

  24. On Léon Bollée, his generosity, and Wright’s need for it in Le Mans, see Howard, op. cit., and The Papers of Wilbur and Orville Wright, op. cit. In the latter (page 906) Wilbur confided his difficulties to Chanute, noting that the Le Mans mechanics’ grasp of English was “rather more limited than I had hoped to find it.” I am grateful as well to Léon Bollée’s family for their help with several details.

  25. “almost as much”: The Papers of Wilbur and Orville Wright, op. cit., 906.

  26. On the tourist trade at Auvours, see Howard, op cit.

  27. He wrote Orville: Wilbur’s letter of October 4, 1908, is included in The Papers of Wilbur and Orville Wright, op. cit.

  28. For more on Blériot, his crashes and his triumphs, see Eric Hodgins and F. Alexander Magoun, Sky High (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1929), 216–20.

  29. On the Reims air meet: ibid., 219–21.

  30. The observation that all airplanes flying today descended from the generation represented in Reims in 1909 is Charles H. Gibbs-Smith’s, from Flight Through the Ages (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1974), 98.

  31. I am grateful to R. E. G. Davies at the Smithsonian for having provided the Igor Sikorsky information.

  32. On the prize money in 1914: Sky High, 235.

  33. For all of the information concerning the Wroblewski brothers I am grateful to René Wroblewski.

  34. “Sir, Maman has now”: Alfred Thénoz in Icare I, 78.

  35. For having gone to extraordinary lengths to straighten out the record regarding SE’s first flight every biographer stands indebted to Colonel Edmond Petit and Jean Lasserre, who published their research in Icare I, 78–79. I am grateful as well to Howard Scherry for having shared with me his tape of a July 17, 1989, interview with Georges Thibaut, the “younger schoolboy” who introduced SE to the fliers.

  36. “he jumped for joy”: From Scherry’s interview with Thibaut, op. cit.

  37. “The wings quivered”: Quoted in Chevrier, 25.

  38. “mon petit Antoine”: René Wroblewski kindly shared these letters of condolence.

  39. For the information on Guy de Saint-Exupéry, I am again grateful to Frédéric d’Agay.

  40. On SE at Mongré: Crane interviewed Louis Barjon in 1951; see Crane, 262–63.

  41. “Our man was”: R. P. Ract, quoted in Crane, 261. P. Solly at Notre-Dame-de-Mongré kindly shared SE’s grades with me.

  42. “Of course I was convinced”: SE, “Books I Remember,” Harper’s Bazaar, April 1941, 123.

  43. “bad Racine”: Maurice Métrai, “Saint-Exupéry a été champion d’escrime à Fribourg,” La Femme d’aujourd’hui et patrie Suisse actualités, Geneva, March 2, 1963.

  44. “At school I wrote”: I am grateful to Seldon Rodman for having shared with me his record of a lunch with SE in early April 1941, during the course of which the Frenchman—surprised to learn that Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks read from right to left—greeted the news with a demonstration of this early talent.

  45. “Guess what?”: Charles Sallès’s recollections appear in Icare I, 81.

  IV LOST HORIZONS

  1. “With melancholy”: SM, 13.

  2. A fine description of the Villa Saint-Jean and its curriculum appears in the catalogue from the 1984 Saint-Exupéry exhibit at the Archives Nationales in Paris, 6. “Not to be less” to “its worst drawbacks”: The school’s prospectus is partially reproduced in that catalogue, 6. Also for background on the school: “Le Père de Miscault égrène des souvenirs,” La Liberté (Fribourg), March 13, 1973, 11.

  3. “I like it here”: ANAT.

  4. “It’s a helpful subject”: LP, 10 (translation mine).

  5. “dutifully with compass” and “From an industrious”: FA, 283.

  6. “You stiffened”: FA, 394.

  7. “flunk like a schoolboy”: FA, 395.

  8. “erstwhile sloth”: CS, 14.

  9. “Is being a man”: CARNETS, 44 (translation mine).

  10. “I felt at once” and “I worshiped Baudelaire”: SE, “Books I Remember,” Harper’s Bazaar, op. cit., April 1941, 123.

  11. “Already a great concern”: Letter from Abbé Fritsch, reprinted in Crane, op. cit., 266.

  12. On SE’s athletic prowess, see Métrai, L
a Femme d’aujourd’hui et patrie Suisse actualités, op. cit., March 2, 1963.

  13. “tipped over the table”: Chevrier, 28.

  14. “Very agile”: Cited in Michel Prévost, Les Nouvelles Littéraires, August 1, 1946, 1.

  15. “left permanent wounds”: Léon-Paul Fargue, Revue de Paris, September, 1945.

  16. Both Bonnevie and Sabran are mentioned frequently in SE’s correspondence with his mother and by Simone de Saint-Exupéry in her Saint-Exupéry (Hachette) essay, 60–65. For more on Bonnevie, see André Chagny, Le Lieutenant Louis de Bonnevie (Lyons: Librairie Pierre Masson, 1930).

  17. “lost his faith”: Interview with Madame de B, January 13, 1992. SE said as much in a letter to his mother of 1931, ANAT.

  18. On SE and confession, ANAT.

  19. “offering himself up”: CS, 66.

  20. “Maman, you cannot know,” “And I was congratulating,” and “And each time”: ANAT.

  21. SE’s suggestion that his mother take a holiday, ANAT.

  22. The statistics regarding the baccalauréat are from J.-B. Piobetta, Le Baccalauréat (Paris: J.-B. Baillière et fils, 1937), 250–52, and from Theodore Zeldin, France 1848–1945, II (London: Oxford University Press, 1977), 269ff. and 841ff.

  23. “I this minute left,” as well as SE’s description of the stay in Paris for his bac are included in his letters to his mother, ANAT.

  24. “The body is an old crock” and the remainder of the account of François’s death, FA, 388–89.

  25. “remained motionless”: LP, 108.

  26. “He reckoned that he had”: Unpublished text of a March 17, 1974, interview with Henry de Ségogne, conserved in Edmond Petit’s archives at the Association des Amis de Saint-Exupéry, Paris.

  27. “I will do my best”: Chevrier, 29.

  28. Simone de Saint-Exupéry wrote of her mother’s attempts to distract her brother after François’s death in Cinq enfants dans un parc. The itinerary can be mapped through his unpublished letters, ANAT, in which figure his impressions of the summer visits. Simone revealed her brother’s summer infatuation with Jeanne de Menthon.

  29. SE’s opinions on the flottards, cyrards, et. al. can be gleaned from his letters to his mother, ANAT.