Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Antoine de Saint Exupéry
Occupation	Aviator, Writer
Nationality	French
Period	1929-1948 (posthumous)
Genre	Autobiography, Belles-Lettres, Children's Literature
Spouse	Consuelo Gómez Carillo de Saint Exupéry, (1931-death)

Antoine de Saint Exupéry (IPA: [ɑ̃twan də sɛ̃tɛgzypeˈʀi]) (June 29, 1900—July 31, 1944) was a French writer and aviator. He is most famous for his novella The Little Prince, and is also well known for his books about aviation adventures, including Night Flight and Wind, Sand and Stars.

Biography

Antoine Jean-Baptiste Marie Roger de Saint Exupéry was born in Lyon to an old family of provincial nobility, the third of five children of Marie de Fonscolombe and Count Jean de Saint Exupéry, an insurance broker who died when his famous son was only four.

After failing his final exams at preparatory school, Saint Exupéry entered the École des Beaux-Arts to study architecture. In 1921, he began his military service with the 2nd Regiment of Chasseurs, and was sent to Strasbourg for training as a pilot. The following year, he obtained his license and was offered transfer to the air force. Bowing to the objections of the family of his fiancée—the future novelist Louise Leveque de Vilmorin—he instead settled in Paris and took an office job. The couple ultimately broke off the engagement, however, and he worked at several jobs over the next few years without success.

By 1926, Saint Exupéry was flying again. He became one of the pioneers of international postal flight, in the days when aircraft had few instruments and pilots flew by instinct. Later he complained that those who flew the more advanced aircraft had become more like accountants than pilots. He worked on the Aéropostale between Toulouse and Dakar.

Writing career

Saint Exupéry's first story, L'Aviateur (The Aviator), was published in the magazine Le Navire d'Argent. In 1929, he published his first book, Courrier Sud (Southern Mail); his career as aviator was also burgeoning, and that same year he flew the Casablanca/Dakar route. He became the director of Cape Juby airfield in Río de Oro, Morocco. In 1929, Saint Exupéry moved to South America, where he was appointed director of the Aeroposta Argentina Company. This period of his life is briefly explored in Wings of Courage, an IMAX film by French director Jean-Jacques Annaud.

Historical marker on the home where Saint Exupéry lived in Quebec.

In 1931, Vol de Nuit (Night Flight)—the first of his major works and winner of the Prix Femina—was published and made his name. (It covers, in concentrated and dramatized version, his experiences with the Aeroposta.) That same year, at Grasse, Saint Exupéry married Consuelo Gómez Carillo (née Suncín Sandoval), a widowed Salvadoran writer and artist. It would be a stormy union, as Saint Exupéry traveled frequently and indulged in numerous affairs, most notably with the Frenchwoman Hélène (Nelly) de Vogüé. De Vogüé would become Saint Exupéry's literary executrix after his death, and also pen a Saint Exupéry biography under the pseudonym Pierre Chevrier.

Desert crash

On December 30, 1935 at 14:45 after a flight of 19 hours and 38 minutes Saint Exupéry, along with his navigator, André Prévot, crashed in the Libyan Sahara desert en route to Saigon. Their plane was a Caudron C-630 Simoun n°7042 (serial F-ANRY). The crash site is believed to have been located in the Wadi Natrun. The team were attempting to fly from Paris to Saigon faster than any previous aviators, for a prize of 150,000 francs. Both survived the landing, but were faced with the frightening prospect of rapid dehydration in the Sahara. Their maps were primitive, vague, and therefore useless. Compounding the problem, the duo had no idea of their location. According to his memoir, Wind, Sand and Stars, their sole supplies were grapes, one orange, and a ration of wine. What Saint Exupéry himself told the press shortly after rescue was that the men had a thermos of very sweet coffee, chocolate, and a handful of crackers, enough to sustain them for one day; beyond that, they had nothing. They experienced visual and auditory hallucinations; by day three, they were so dehydrated they ceased to sweat. Finally, on day four, a Bedouin on camelback discovered the aviators and administered a local dehydration treatment, saving Saint Exupéry and Prévot's lives. Saint Exupéry's charming fable The Little Prince, which begins with a pilot being marooned in the desert, is in part a reference to this experience.

American sojourn and The Little Prince

Saint Exupéry continued to write and fly until the beginning of World War II, part of a small number of aviator-authors of the time that also included James Salter, James Dickey and Randall Jarrell. During the conflict, he initially flew with the GR II/33 reconnaissance squadron of the Armée de l'Air. Then, after France's 1940 armistice with Germany, he traveled to the United States. The Saint-Exupérys lived in a penthouse apartment at 240 Central Park South in New York City and a rented mansion in Asharoken on Long Island's north shore between January, 1941 and April, 1943, and also in Quebec City for a time in 1942. He wrote The Little Prince in Asharoken in the summer and fall of 1942; the manuscript was completed by October.

Disappearance in flight

Following his nearly twenty-five months in North America, Saint Exupéry returned to Europe to fly with the Free French and fight with the Allies in a Mediterranean-based squadron. Then 43, he was 13 years older than men normally assigned such air duties; he also suffered recurring and intense pain, due to distention of the bones brought on by his many fractures. He was assigned with a number of other pilots to P-38s, which an officer described as "war-weary, non-airworthy craft."

Saint Exupéry's final assignment was to collect intelligence on German troop movements in and around the Rhone River Valley preceding the Allied invasion of southern France. On the cool, soft evening of July 31, 1944, he left from an airbase on Corsica, and was never seen again. German aerial combat records of July 31, 1944 do not list the downing of enemy aircraft in the Mediterranean. A woman reported having watched a plane crash around noon of August the first near the Bay of Carqueiranne. An unidentifiable body wearing French colors was found several days later and buried in Carqueiranne that September.

Bracelet and plane found and confirmed

More than half a century later, in 1998, a fisherman named Jean-Claude Bianco found what was reported to be Saint Exupéry's silver chain bracelet in the sea to the east of the island of Riou, south of Marseille. At first, the find was thought to be a hoax, but later the jewelry was positively identified. It had been engraved with the names of his wife and his publishers, Reynal & Hitchcock—the lodestars of his life—and was hooked to a piece of fabric, presumably from his flight suit.

In 2000, a diver named Luc Vanrell found a Lockheed P-38 Lightning crashed in the seabed off the coast of Marseille. Extraction followed in October of 2003. On April 7, 2004, investigators from the French Underwater Archaeological Department confirmed that the plane was, indeed, Saint Exupéry's. The wreckage found showed traces of neither shooting nor aerial combat. In June, 2004, fragments were given to the Museum of Air and Space in Le Bourget, France.

The location of the crash site and the bracelet are less than 80km by sea from where the unidentified French soldier was found in Carqueiranne, and it remains plausible, but has not been confirmed, that the body was carried there by ocean currents after the crash over the course of several days.

Speculations in March 2008

In March 2008, a former pilot of the Luftwaffe, 88-year-old Horst Rippert, told La Provence, a Marseilles newspaper, that he engaged and downed a P-38 Lightning plane on July 31, 1944 in the area where Saint-Exupéry's plane was found. According to Rippert, he was on a reconnaissance mission over the Mediterranean sea when he saw a P-38 with a French emblem behind him near Toulon. Rippert says he opened fire at the P-38, which crashed into the sea.

After the war, Horst Rippert became a journalist and led the ZDF sports department. Rippert says he came to believe that he had probably shot down Saint Exupéry, a writer Rippert knew of because he had read his books during his youth — Exupéry was even one of his favorite authors. Rippert has written a forthcoming book discussing the alleged Saint-Exupéry shootdown. Horst Rippert is the brother of the late singer Ivan Rebroff, whose immense estate Rippert stepped forward to claim four days after his death.

It remains unclear why the recovered fragments of Saint Exupéry's P-38 showed no traces of combat, or why German aerial combat records of July 31, 1944 list no downings of enemy aircraft in the Mediterranean.

Honors

• Saint Exupéry is commemorated by a plaque in the Parisian Panthéon.
• Until the euro was introduced in 2002, his image and his drawing of the Little Prince appeared on France's 50-franc note.
• In 2000, the Lyon Satolas Airport was renamed Saint-Exupéry International Airport in his honor.

Literary works

While not precisely autobiographical, Saint Exupéry's work is inspired by his experiences as a pilot. One exception is The Little Prince, a poetic self-illustrated tale in which a pilot stranded in the desert meets a young prince from a tiny asteroid. The Little Prince is a philosophical story, including societal criticism and remarking on the strangeness of the adult world.

• L'Aviateur (1926)
• Courrier Sud (1929) (translated into English as Southern Mail)
• Vol de Nuit (1931) (translated into English as Night Flight)
• Terre des Hommes (1939) (translated into English as Wind, Sand and Stars)
• Pilote de Guerre (1942) (translated into English as Flight to Arras)
• Lettre à un Otage (1943) (translated into English as Letter to a Hostage)
• Le Petit Prince (1943) (translated into English as The Little Prince)
• Citadelle (1948) (translated into English as The Wisdom of the Sands), posthumous
• Lettres de jeunesse (1953), posthumous
• Carnets (1953), posthumous
• Lettres à sa mère (1955), posthumous
• Écrits de guerre (1982), posthumous
• Manon, danseuse (2007), posthumous

Literary references

• He wrote : "We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children." ("Nous n'héritons pas de la terre de nos ancêtres, nous l'empruntons à nos enfants.")
• A year or two after his disappearance, Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry wrote The Tale of the Rose, which was unpublished until 2000, a full century after Antoine de Saint Exupéry's birth on June 29, 1900.
• Saint Exupéry is mentioned in Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff: "A saint in short, true to his name, flying up here at the right hand of God. The good Saint-Ex! And he was not the only one. He was merely the one who put it into words most beautifully and anointed himself before the altar of the right stuff."
• Comics author Hugo Pratt imagined the fantastic story of Saint-Exupéry's last flight in Saint Exupéry : le dernier vol (1994).
• His 1939 book Terre des hommes was the inspiration for the theme of Expo 67 in Montreal, also translated into English as "Man and His World".
• Saint Exupéry is the hero of Alma, a protagonist in Nicole Krauss' novel "The History of Love".
• From The Moviegoer by Walker Percy: "Tolstoy and Saint-Exupéry were right about war, etc."

Film

• Saint Exupéry and Consuelo were portrayed by Bruno Ganz and Miranda Richardson in the 1996 movie Saint-Ex: The Story of the Storyteller.

See also

• The Bevin House
• Aviators
• Missing persons
• List of people who have disappeared

References

• Stacy Schiff (1994). Saint-Exupéry: A Biography. Pimlico.
• "From The Murky Depths", by Benjamin Ivry in the Wall Street Journal, April 15, 2004.

External links

• Official website - French language
• Another website about Antoine de Saint Exupéry
• Works of Saint Exupéry (public domain in Canada)