by Stacy Schiff
88. proofs of the French edition: The title page is reproduced in the 1984 Archives Nationales exhibition catalogue, 103, as is a long list of possible titles written in SE’s hand.
89. In French aviation circles: Letter from Robert Boname, December 12, 1992.
XIV WHERE IS FRANCE?
1. Fortified by whiskey: Jacques Baratier, Les Nouvelles Littéraires, March 18, 1939, 1. “Curious,” he remarked: Chevrier, 176. Her published account of this visit is supplemented by our conversations and by the writings of Henry Bordeaux.
2. later he was to tell: Raoul de Roussy de Sales, The Making of Yesterday (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947), 43–44. The journal entry is dated August 7, 1939. See also 48–49.
3. Marx and Comte: Henry Bordeaux, “Antoine de Saint-Exupéry,” Écrits de Paris, September 1948, 89.
4. to read Einstein: EG, 114.
5. “The kind of man”: Chevrier, 176.
6. They have so many airplanes: Pélissier, 33–34.
7. “a philosophical analysis”: Raoul de Roussy de Sales, The Making of Yesterday, 44.
8. The first review: Robert Brasillach, L’Action Française, March 16, 1939.
9. “This volume is put”: Paul Nizan, Ce Soir, March 30, 1939.
10. “SE, aviator and moralist”: André Thérive, Le Temps, April 27, 1939.
11. Edmond Jaloux placed: Jaloux, Les Nouvelles Littéraires, April 8, 1939.
12. “a beautiful book”: Clare Leighton, The New York Times Book Review, June 18, 1939, 1.
13. “To read it is to forget” and “contrasting moods”: Edward Weeks, The Atlantic, August 1939.
14. “Antoine de SE is awake”: Ben Ray Redman, New York Herald Tribune, June 18, 1939, 1.
15. “God-like tolerance”: Cecil Lewis, The Spectator, October 6, 1939, 478–79.
16. “He touches nothing” and “visions and dreams”: The Times Literary Supplement, September 23, 1939.
17. an experience he compared and the account of the Académie Française’s deliberations: Bordeaux, Écrits de Paris, September 1948, 89.
18. “His timidity intimidated”: Lucě Estang recalled this 1939 interview in his biography of SE, Saint-Exupéry par lui-meme (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1958), 16.
19. “Interviewing Monsieur Antoine de SE” and “I have much faith”: Luc Estang writing as Boisgontier, “Cinq minutes avec Monsieur Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, lauréat du grand prix du roman,” Le Figaro Littéraire, May 27, 1939, 1.
20. “on whom depend many”: Fidus, Revue des Deux-Mondes, May 27, 1939, 854.
21. a couscous dinner: I am again especially grateful to Madeleine Goisot for her memories of this evening.
22. “The name ‘SE’ ”: Jeanine Delpech, Les Nouvelles Littéraires, May 27, 1939, 1.
23. he was inconsolable: Pélissier, 81.
24. more delighted even: Madame de B, interview of January 30, 1992.
25. the two thought SE talked drivel: Simone de Beauvoir, Letters to Sartre (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1991), 175–76. See also Jean-Paul Sartre, Witness to My Life: The Letters of Jean-Paul Sartre to Simone de Beauvoir, 1926–1939 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1992), 370–75.
26. “under the influence”: Jean-Paul Sartre, ibid., 371.
27. “taken the threat of war”: Flanner, Paris Was Yesterday, 220.
28. He was not known to have been: But he may have been surprised by several claims made after his death.
29. “You are going to be”: SE to Ségogne, courtesy of Anne Roque and Arnaud de Ségogne. Lunch was a straightforward: Based on Werth’s descriptions of the afternoon, including those in several unpublished pages passed on by Claude Werth, who also remembered the lunch vividly.
30. “shrines of memory”: Werth, Déposition (Paris: Viviane Hamy, 1992), 61. “At Fleurville, the Saône”: ibid., 61.
31. “Tonight, three of my”: Sallès, Icare I, 86.
32. “he preferred human beings”: Pierre Dalloz, Confluences, 160.
33. “virile affection”: A portion of the December 14, 1939, address of Louis Gillet, the director of the Académie Française, is reproduced in Icare III, 121.
34. “the ability to defy”: CARNETS, 234.
35. “pilote complémentaire” and “Didn’t he after all”: Louis Couhé, Icare III, 106. Also Louis Castex, “Antoine de Saint-Exupéry tel que je l’ai connu,” Illustration, August 1954.
36. “passager mascotte”: Georges Bouchard, Icare III, 106.
37. “embourgeoisé“. “Avec Guillaumet l’homme des miracles de New-York à Biscarrosse,” Paris-Soir, July 22, 1939, 3.
38. “Tell Delgove to replace”: Henri Delgove, Icare, 108, 1er trimestre, 1984 (hereafter Icare VII), 73.
39. heard all about Anne Morrow Lindbergh, “The Camembert is always,” and “HAVE CELEBRATED”: Robert de Saint-Jean, “Avec Saint-Ex en plein Atlantique j’ai recontré Guillaumet,” Paris-Soir, August 11, 1939, 2.
40. “sacrifices acrobatiques”: Ader Picard Tajan auction catalogue, Drouot sale of July 6, 1984, item no. 11, part 3.
41. “pas un mot” and “One of those drunken”: Anne Morrow Lindbergh, War Within and Without (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 21. The account of the Lindbergh weekend comes entirely from War Within and Without, Anne Lindbergh’s preface to SE’s Wartime Writings—an abridged version of Écrits de guerre (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986)—and my interview with Anne Lindbergh, December 5, 1990.
42. “talk back in French”: Lindbergh, War Within and Without, 22.
43. “child-wife”: Nigel Nicolson cited in Dorothy Herrmann, Anne Morrow Lindbergh (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1992), 194.
44. “Oh—not so far apart”: War Within and Without, 26.
45. “But I never know”: ibid., 27. “There are the people one can”: 30. “For the second time”: 35. “mind had been quickened”: 35. “summer lightning”: 23.
46. “became for me the lens”: Lindbergh, Wartime Writings, xii.
47. “like a letter to him”: War Within and Without, 447. If Charles was the earth: ibid. “Are you going to look”: ibid., 449.
48. “I think he probably”: Charles Lindbergh, The Wartime Journals of Charles A. Lindbergh (New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), 269.
49. Middlebury College summer school: For two very different perspectives on the August 11–13 visit, I am grateful to Alain Guilloton (who was eleven at the time) and to Stephen Freeman, then dean of the French School. Yvonne Michel was also able to offer invaluable help, interview of January 4, 1991. The photos are Professor Freeman’s.
50. SE confided his fears: Raoul de Roussy de Sales, The Making of Yesterday, 48–49.
51. “when the headlines”: SE used the expression in his interview with Robert Van Gelder, published as “A Talk with Antoine de Saint-Exupéry,” The New York Times Book Review, January 19, 1941, 2.
52. to whom he wrote passionately: The letters are cited in part in Chevrier, 215–17, and in slightly larger part in EG, 54–56. “I am not embarrassed”: EG, 55.
53. “In order to fly” and “Except modesty”: Delange, 80–81.
54. “All the same he isn’t”: Gavoille’s response was recorded by Jean Dutertre, Icare, 78, Autumn 1976 (hereafter Icare IV), 69.
55. “Is he going to make”: Jean Israël, interview with author, January 22, 1991.
56. “Isn’t he forty?”: Dutertre, interview of January 16, 1991, and Icare IV, 69.
57. “Lieutenant Laux” and “SE, pilot”: Dutertre, Icare IV, 69.
58. “It’s very nice here”: ibid., 69–70. Also Icare, 40.
59. “he had tamed us”: Israël, interview, January 22, 1991.
60. You must not have been: The legendary incident was reported by SE himself, EG, 67.
61. had wanted a Bugatti: Madame de B, interview of January 21, 1992.
62. Israël remembered a trip: Interview of January 22, 1991, as in Icare IV, 59.
63. “I like it here” and “You kno
w, Captain”: An interview with Madame Scherschell appeared in L’Est Républicain, February 3, 1961, 4bis.
64. “A freezing bed”: EG, 97. Similarly, to Madame de B, EG, 69–70.
65. “In temperate climates”: EG, 97.
66. polar hedgehogs: I have drawn on many accounts in this section but chief among them are Jean-Marie Chirol, Groupes de Chasse et de Reconnaissance à Orconte et Saint-Dizier (Paris: Langres, 1981), Guy Bougerol, Ceux qu’on n’a jamais vus (Grenoble: Arthaud, 1943), and the 2/33’s journal de marche and historique, which can be found at SHAA.
67. “It’s understandable but”: EG, 108.
68. “Some of the German pilots”: A. J. Liebling, The Road Back to Paris (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1944), 88.
69. “a realistic ideal”: Max Gelée, Icare VI, 82.
70. “this odd planet”: EG, 66.
71. “The next time around”: Gelée, Icare VI, 82.
72. Also this winter: Jean Israël, an engineer by training, has been eloquent on the subject of SE’s inventions of 1939–40. See “Saint-Exupéry inventeur,” Cahiers de l’Aéro-Club de France, June 1991, 10–12
73. “In the kind of adolescent”: André George, La Nef, September 1945, 23.
74. “an entirely anonymous soldier”: EG, 57.
75. Werth observed: Werth, Déposition, 123.
76. “a sort of aerial deep-sea diver”: Jeanson, 70 ans, 237.
77. the only order to “Ah, Monsieur, thank heavens”: The account is entirely from Chevrier, who was there, 220.
78. “Diction excellent”: Unpublished letter of October 1939 from Madame de SE to her son, Frédéric d’Agay archives.
79. pack a copy of Terre: Le Figaro, January 6, 1940.
80. “We urgently request”: Frédéric d’Agay provided a copy of the Ministère de l’Information’s May 24, 1940, letter. Copies of all of this correspondence can be found in the air force files, SHAA. These include a polite but firm letter dated March 25, 1940, from the French commander-in-chief to the Ministre de l’Air explaining why SE could not be separated from the 2/33, where he was said to be invaluable (true) as an instructor (false).
81. The captain managed to reason: Gelée, Icare IV, 66–67.
82. “That would be discourteous”: Werth, Tel Quel, 184.
83. Dorothy Thompson told: Interview with Madame de B, January 8, 1992, and Dorothy Thompson, New York Herald Tribune, June 7, 1940, 21. “You are absolutely wrong”: ibid.
84. On the other side of the world: Lindbergh, War Within and Without, 102–107.
85. “absences de moi-měme”: “Lettres de guerre à un ami,” Le Figaro Littéraire, July 27, 1957, 1. The letter, to Madame de B, is reprinted as well in EG.
86. brag to his commanding officer: Henri Alias, Icare IV, 94.
87. He had no logical: EG, 68–70, among other such admissions.
88. “cops and robbers” and “grim charade”: FA, 311–12.
89. On one occasion when it did: Israël, Icare IV, 57.
90. “We face the prospect”: FA, 348.
91. “We knew that the Germans”: Dutertre interview, January 16, 1991.
92. “a desire to take charge”: EG, 68.
93. “When you are in danger”: EG, 72.
94. Over and over he insisted: See Ader Picard Tajan auction catalogue, July 6, 1984, Drouot sale, item no. 76.
95. serenity when under siege: EG, 63.
96. He told the Lindberghs: Lindbergh, War Within and Without, 27.
97. “to the extent to which”: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-sense (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 306.
98. “I knew that the first”: Cited in Delange, 84.
99. He so much pressed: Max Gelée, Icare IV, 65.
100. “If you had your way”: André George, La Nef, September 1945, 25.
101. “When the flight is normal”: Alias, Icare IV, 94.
102. Laux was surprised: Laux, Icare V, 49.
103. He got little satisfaction and “If anyone in the group”: SE went on at length about his medical condition to Galantière in 1941, BL. In FA he admits only that his old fractures were giving him trouble, 301.
104. Why had no one: Chevrier, 225. Chevrier has him meeting with Reynaud on the sixteenth.
105. an announcement he remembered: Winston Churchill, Memoirs of the Second World War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 252.
106. tersely described the apocalyptic: see Dutertre, Icare IV, 71–73.
107. “Is something broken”: Dutertre, ibid., 72. I have based the account of the flight on my interview with Colonel Dutertre, on his 1940 contribution to the 2/33’s historique (SHAA), on his published accounts over the last fifty years, on those of the 1/33’s veterans (Icare IV, 78–83), and on the 2/33’s journal de marche (SHAA).
108. “I would now be playing”: Archives of the Association des Amis de Saint-Exupéry.
109. “interminable syrup”: FA, 349.
110. One minute, he told a reporter: Le Devoir (Montreal), April 26, 1942. The recollections of Michel Albeaux-Fernet, the third at dinner that night, can be found in EG, 106–108. “I felt like a fish”: Le Devoir (Montreal), May 2, 1942.
111. “We amount to nothing”: Werth, 33 jours (Paris: Viviane Hamy, 1992), 13. He blamed SE”: ibid., 49.
112. “Monsieur de SE” and “Never”: J.-G. Bougerol, Icare, Spring 1971.
113. “driven by the enemy”: FA, 286 (translation mine).
114. “The news from France”: Churchill, Memoirs of the Second World War, 254.
115. “France has fallen”: Raoul de Roussy de Sales, The Making of Yesterday, 133.
116. “We’re off to Algeria”: LSM, 218.
117. a fact the pilot took great pleasure: See Suzanne Massu, Icare IV, 96–99. an acrobatic feat: So Massu was told by “the connoisseurs,” ibid., 99.
118. Pélissier found his friend: Pélissier, 36.
119. “Pointless to extinguish”: Suzanne Massu, Icare IV, 99. Also, Massu, Quand j’ětais Rochambelle (Paris: Grasset, 1969). The two accounts differ slightly.
XV RESISTANCE ON FIFTH AVENUE
1. “This is me”: My thanks to the late René Gavoille for a copy of this dedication page, reproduced in Icare VI, 28–29.
2. confessed that he had been nervous: Henri Alias, Icare IV, 93.
3. “lost its soul”: “historique” of the 2/33, SHAA.
4. “My companions are all”: Hélène Froment, On ne revient pas (Paris: Gallimard, 1941), 193. Fontaine, too, writes odes to his freezing bed.
5. preoccupied, whispering adults: Mireille d’Agay, Icare III, 22–23.
6. who had been put off: April 13, 1942, memorandum to Donovan from John C. Wiley, OSS files, INT 12FR21, NA. SE was put off as well by the anti-de Gaulle sentiments expressed by various friends in the military.
7. “He turned in circles”: Gisèle d’Assailly, “En Parlant de Saint-Exupéry,” La Gazette des Arts et Lettres, December 21, 1946.
8. “half-separated”: Interview with Maximilian Becker, September 21, 1990. SE uses the word himself in his 1939 correspondence with his agent when discussing the distribution of his assets in the event of his death.
9. Suzanne Werth finally confided: Her query—and Madame de B’s response—can be found in Claude Werth’s archives.
10. “wanted to protect him”: Froment, 198.
11. “Paris, Germany”: The observation is Flanner’s, The New Yorker, December 7, 1940.
12. “Out of a thousand”: Eve Curie, Philippe Barrés, Raoul de Roussy de Sales, eds., They Speak for a Nation (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1941), 237.
13. he claimed was his conscience: EG, 98.
14. “My friend there is” and “See you soon, then”: Robert Boname, Icare V, 107. Also, interview with Robert Boname, December 20, 1990. Joseph Kessel wrote his brother from Vichy: “J’ai vu ici Saint-Ex, et ç’a été une joie rare. Tu le verras prochainement. Il va pour un mois à New York” (Courri�
�res, Joseph Kessel, 538).
15. “There goes the man”: Roger Beaucaire, EG, 128. The story exists in many variations; Beaucaire’s account, among the plainest, seems closest to the truth.
16. Gallimard had called on Gide: van Rysselberghe, Cahiers André Gide VI, 199–200. For more on Drieu La Rochelle and the NRF, see Pierre Andreu and Frederic Grover, Drieu La Rochelle (Paris: Hachette, 1979), 451–60.
17. “I’m not made”: Chevrier, 229.
18. “I think it imperative” and “I think it is time”: Beucler, Icare IV, 113.
19. “You will show me”: Giroud, Leçons particulières, 104. See also Odile Yelnik, Jean Prévost (Paris: Fayard, 1979), 150–51.
20. “opportunities for his deliverance”: Werth, Déposition, 61.
21. “When I want something”: Lucas, Icare II, 104.
22. “If I come back”: Billon, Icare IV, 117. The film was never made, despite Billon’s best attempts.
23. “I like books which give”: Georges Altman, Le Progrès (Lyons), October 30, 1940, 1.
24. See also Altman, Volonté de ceux de la Résistance, February 21, 1945.
25. Another reunion that week: Jean Macaigne, interview of January 4, 1991.
26. SE outlined for Chambe to “Right here, damn it all”: Chambe, Icare IV, 121.
27. “Rarely have I seen”: Prince Alexander Makinsky, cited in Cate, 427.
28. “I felt neither”: OTAGE, 391 (translation mine).
29. “Under attack”: Migeo, Henri Guillaumet, 187.
30. “Guillaumet is dead”: Chevrier, 230.
31. “I’ve learned so many”: OTAGE, 392.
32. “I would like to talk”: Jacques de Dampierre, EG, 141.
33. “To live is to be”: Mlle. Dutheil, of the École Française of Lisbon, cited in Crane, 280–81.
34. He wanted very much: SE cable to Becker, December 21, 1940. Becker papers.
35. the writer good-naturedly engaged: I am indebted to Joseph Laitin for his recollections, which greatly supplement the New York Times report of SE’s arrival, January 1, 1941, 20.
36. “I am not a crystal”: ibid. Cécile Busignies provided helpful details regarding the Siboney crossing, interviews of October 8, 1990, and August 24, 1993. She remembered SE’s quip about Columbus.
