Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Antoine Marie Jean-Baptiste Roger de Saint-Exupery was born on June 29, 1900, in the 2nd arrondissement of Lyon, the third of five children in an aristocratic family whose title dated back centuries but whose fortune had largely evaporated ^[1]. His father, Jean de Saint-Exupery, an insurance broker, died of a stroke in 1904, leaving his widow Marie de Fonscolombe to raise the children with help from relatives. Much of Antoine's childhood passed at the chateau of Saint-Maurice-de-Remens, a family property in the Ain countryside east of Lyon that he later recalled as the happiest place of his life ^[2].

The boy was dreamy, stubborn, and mechanically curious. In the summer of 1912, at the airfield of Amberieu near the family estate, he took his first flight as a passenger, an event that fixed aviation in his imagination for good ^[1]. His schooling was uneven. He studied with the Jesuits in Le Mans, then at a school run by Marianist priests in Fribourg, Switzerland, during the First World War. The death of his younger brother Francois from rheumatic fever in 1917 marked him deeply; Antoine sat at his bedside in the final hours ^[2].

After the war he prepared for the entrance examination of the Ecole Navale, the French naval academy, and failed the oral portion. He drifted for a time, auditing architecture courses at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris while living in cheap lodgings, uncertain what to do with himself ^[1].

Military service rescued him from drift. Called up in 1921, Saint-Exupery was assigned to an air regiment in Strasbourg as ground crew, paid privately for flying lessons, and earned his pilot's license the same year ^[1]. A crash in 1923, followed by pressure from the family of his then fiancee Louise de Vilmorin, pushed him briefly into office jobs in Paris, including a stint as a truck salesman that he performed badly and hated. The engagement collapsed, and by 1926 he was determined to fly for a living.

That year he joined the Latecoere company in Toulouse, the airmail enterprise that later became Aeropostale. Under its exacting operations director Didier Daurat, he carried mail along the line from Toulouse to Casablanca and Dakar in fragile open-cockpit Breguet aircraft ^[3]. In 1927 he was named chief of the isolated airfield at Cape Juby on the coast of the Spanish Sahara, where his duties included negotiating with local tribes for the release of downed pilots. The posting gave him eighteen months of desert solitude and the raw material of his first novel, Southern Mail (Courrier Sud), published in 1929 ^[2].

Aeropostale then sent him to South America as director of its Argentine subsidiary, where he helped open night routes to Patagonia alongside pilots such as Jean Mermoz and Henri Guillaumet ^[3]. Out of this period came Night Flight (Vol de Nuit, 1931), a taut short novel about the discipline and cost of the night mail. It won the Prix Femina, carried a preface by Andre Gide, and made Saint-Exupery famous in France and abroad; Hollywood adapted it in 1933 with John Barrymore and Clark Gable ^[4].

Anyone asking who was Antoine de Saint-Exupery usually meets the writer before the pilot, yet the two careers were inseparable. His books grew directly from the cockpit. After Aeropostale collapsed financially in the early 1930s, he worked as a test pilot, a publicist for Air France, and a journalist, reporting from Moscow in 1935 and from Spain during the civil war for Paris newspapers ^[2].

His flying brought him repeatedly close to death, and those episodes became literature. In December 1935, attempting to break the Paris to Saigon speed record with his mechanic Andre Prevot, he crashed in the Libyan desert. The two men walked for days with almost no water, hallucinating, until a Bedouin caravan found them ^[1]. The ordeal anchors the most famous chapters of Wind, Sand and Stars (Terre des Hommes, 1939), a book of reflective episodes about flight, comradeship, and human responsibility. It won the Grand Prix du Roman of the Academie Francaise and, in its American edition, the National Book Award for nonfiction ^[4].

His best known work came out of exile. Living in New York after the fall of France, he published Flight to Arras (1942), an account of a near-suicidal reconnaissance mission flown in May 1940, and then The Little Prince (Le Petit Prince), issued in New York in April 1943 with his own watercolor illustrations ^[5]. The story of a downed aviator and a child from asteroid B-612 has since been translated into several hundred languages and dialects and ranks among the best selling books ever published ^[5]. Among Antoine de Saint-Exupery achievements, this slim fable, written for children but read most attentively by adults, remains the most durable.

In 1931 Saint-Exupery married Consuelo Suncin Sandoval, a Salvadoran writer and artist who had been widowed by the Guatemalan journalist Enrique Gomez Carrillo. Their marriage was passionate, unstable, and marked by long separations and infidelities on both sides, yet neither ever fully let go of the other ^[2]. Consuelo is widely read as the model for the rose in The Little Prince, the demanding, fragile flower the prince loves and abandons. Her own memoir of the marriage, The Tale of the Rose, written in the 1940s, was discovered in a trunk and published only in 2000 ^[6].

Friends described a large, heavy-set man of restless charm who performed card tricks compulsively, telephoned people in the middle of the night to read them drafts, and sketched constantly on napkins and letters. He was careless with money, generous to a fault, and increasingly troubled by injuries from a string of crashes, including a severe one at Guatemala City in 1938 that left him with lasting pain and limited mobility in one shoulder ^[1].

Politically he refused easy labels. During the war years in New York he declined to endorse Charles de Gaulle, arguing for unity among the French rather than allegiance to any faction, a stance that earned him attacks from Gaullist circles and left him isolated among the exiles ^[2].

Saint-Exupery could not stay out of the war. In 1943 he left New York for North Africa and lobbied relentlessly to rejoin his old reconnaissance unit, Groupe 2/33, which now flew American Lockheed P-38 Lightnings. At forty-three he was roughly a decade over the age limit for the aircraft, and his old injuries made even fastening his flight suit difficult, but he obtained repeated exemptions ^[1].

On July 31, 1944, he took off from an airfield on Corsica on a mapping mission over southern France in preparation for the Allied landings in Provence. He never returned. No distress call was heard, and for decades the site and cause of the crash were unknown, which allowed the disappearance to grow into a national mystery ^[3].

Answers came slowly. In 1998 a fisherman working near Marseille pulled up a silver identity bracelet engraved with the names of Saint-Exupery and Consuelo. In 2000 a diver located the scattered wreckage of a P-38 on the seabed near the île de Riou, and in 2004 French investigators confirmed from serial numbers that it was his aircraft ^[7]. The wreck showed no clear evidence of aerial combat, and the exact cause, whether mechanical failure, pilot incapacity, or enemy fire, has never been established with certainty. A former Luftwaffe pilot later stated he had shot down a P-38 in that area on that day, a claim that cannot be verified against German records ^[7].

Few writers are so thoroughly woven into their country's memory. France placed Saint-Exupery on the 50 franc banknote in the 1990s, inscribed his name in the Pantheon in 1967, and renamed the Lyon airport Lyon-Saint-Exupery in 2000, the centenary of his birth ^[3]. Streets, schools, and a museum territory of plaques across France and Morocco keep the aviator's routes visible on the map.

The Little Prince sustains a global afterlife that outstrips almost any comparison. Estimates place worldwide sales well above one hundred million copies, and the book has been adapted for opera, ballet, film, and animation, with dedicated museums in Hakone, Japan, and elsewhere ^[5]. Its lines about seeing rightly only with the heart circulate far beyond readers who know the author's name, a strange fate for a book its creator finished barely a year before his death.

For readers of any Antoine de Saint-Exupery biography, the harder legacy lies in the earlier books. Wind, Sand and Stars and Night Flight preserved a vanished profession, the airmail pilot navigating by rivers and lighthouse beams, and turned it into an ethics of duty and attention. Pilots still cite him; humanists still argue with him. The basic Antoine de Saint-Exupery facts, a short life, nine books, one disappearance, explain little of that hold. The prose does ^[4].