Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: Beyond The Little Prince
Stuart McClintock
Associate Professor of French
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is best known for his book The Little Prince, a work
that has been translated into nearly one hundred languages and is said to have sold more
copies than any book except the Bible (Schiff 450). Saint-Exupéry deserves to be known
for more than The Little Prince. He is a fascinating character who was integrally involved
in the development of both literary modernism and commercial aviation in France in the
first half of the twentieth century.
He was born on June 29, 1900, in Lyons, France's second city. He was the third of
five children and the first of two consecutive boys. His parents were Jean and Marie de
Saint-Exupéry. They both came from aristocratic families. She was a de Fonscolombe,
and the Saint-Exupéry name went back to the Middle Ages.i Antoine's father was gay and
charming, and his mother was musical, artistic, and spiritual. Antoine inherited all of
these traits.
Antoine's father died in 1904 before the youngster was five years old. Marie de
Saint-Exupéry was twenty-eight, had five children, and no fixed income. He never wrote
about his father, and the influence on him from this point forward would be largely
feminine. Madame de Saint-Exupéry's godmother and great-aunt, the Countess of
Tricaud, came to the family's rescue. She offered to let the family stay at her apartment in
Lyons in the winter and at her estate north of town, le Château de Saint Maurice de
Rémens, in summer. The children grew up freely at Saint Maurice. Their mother had a
gift for storytelling, another trait her son picked up, and she filled her children's heads
with tales of secret gardens and hidden treasure.ii They staged plays and musicals, and
Antoine showed an interest in mechanics. He designed a motor-driven irrigation system
and built a flying bicycle at twelve. He also developed a passion for flora and fauna at the
estate, which is reflected in his use of horticultural and animal imagery in his works.
In 1909, the family moved to Antoine's paternal grandfather's house in Le Mans
in central France. The purpose was for Antoine and his brother François to attend the
Jesuit school that was a family tradition. Their brief stay in this provincial town was not
particularly successful scholastically. However, it proved to be very beneficial in
developing Antoine's love of aviation. In 1908 Wilbur Wright had come to Le Mans to
sell his new warped-wing plane called the Flyer to the French. He established himself in
this city because its Hunaudières race course could be used as an airfield and because a
local car manufacturer and flying enthusiast, Léon Bollée, offered Wright the use of his
factory. Already passionate about flying, the French were thrilled at Wright's aeronautical
exploits, some of which, such as the figure eight, had not previously been performed in
Europe. Wright left Le Mans before the Saint Exupérys lived there, but his spirit still
hung over the city and captured Antoine's imagination.iii
Saint-Exupéry took his baptême de l'air, his baptism in the air, at the Ambérieu
airfield when he was twelve years old. He had taken to hanging around this training
ground just north of the chateau bantering with the mechanics and pilots. When he
insisted that he had his mother's permission to fly, they finally acquiesced to his repeated
requests to take him up in a plane. This experience convinced him that he was destined
for a career in the skies.
1
Saint-Ex, as he was called by his friends, spent the 1915-1917 war years at the
Villa Saint-Jean, a Marianist school in Fribourg, Switzerland.iv He liked this school more
than the Jesuit institutions he had previously attended; it was the only one of his many
schools to which he later made a pilgrimage. He was a dreamy student and did not excel
at his studies but did well enough to pass his baccalauréat, the state exam that is the
passkey to higher education.
He moved to Paris in 1917 to prepare for the entrance exams to the naval
academy in Brest. v He took rooms in the Collège Bossuet under the supervision of Abbé
Sudour, who became a mentor for Antoine. He took tutorials at one of Paris' most
prestigious lycées, Saint-Louis, with a few other young aristocrats prepping for entrance
into one of the grandes écoles or service academies. He failed his first entrance exam in
1919 and then his second in 1920. This marked the end of his formal schooling.
He did his compulsory military service in Strasbourg from 1921-1923. He wanted
to join pilot training school but was denied entry because he did not have the previous
training required to participate in this program. Never one to be denied what he wanted,
Saint-Exupéry found an unorthodox way of earning his pilot's wings during his service.
With the unwritten permission of the base commander, he was able to take private
lessons at his base's airfield because it was also used by commercial aircraft companies,
one of which he paid to teach him. He returned to the capital after his military service and
resumed the life of the Young Man in Paris he had put aside two years earlier.
During his preparatory years in Paris and after his military service, he took
advantage of the city's attractions. He went weekly to the Louvre. Many aristocratic
family members and friends lived in the capital, most importantly his aunt, Yvonne de
Lestrange, the Duchess of Treviso. She lived in a townhouse overlooking the Seine on the
quai Malaquais in the sixth arrondissement. She regularly invited Antoine to the
Comédie Française and introduced him to Paris' literary circles. She hosted a salon to
which she invited writers, politicians, publishers such as Gaston Gallimard, and her
young nephew.
After World War I, Paris was the artistic capital of the world. French and foreign
writers, painters, sculptors, and musicians flocked to the city. In 1920, Joyce and Pound
moved to Paris, followed shortly thereafter by Eliot, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald. The
writers' neighborhood was the sixth arrondissement, more specifically the tiny warren of
streets around the rue de l'Odéon and the boulevard Saint-Germain. So densely
concentrated and literally productive were the writers in this quartier that Joyce termed it
"Stratford-on-Odéon" (Schiff 122). Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company, which
published Ulysses in 1922, and Adrienne Monnier's Maison des Amis des Livres were
both on rue de L'Odéon. The cafés next to and across from each other on the boulevard
Saint-Germain such as the Flore, the Deux Magots, and the Brasserie Lipp, all of which
still exist, became the new salons.
This was the Paris to which Saint-Exupéry returned in 1923. This was the literary
scene he wanted to enter, but he was still unpublished and needed a job. He had no fixed
address and had difficulty keeping up financially with the aristocratic crowd with whom
he socialized. His goal was to fly professionally, and he succeeded in getting a job flying
tourists on fifteen-minute joyrides above Paris. This work was not particularly
remunerative or time consuming, but he was being paid to fly for the first time, and he
did have a lot of free time to write.
2
Saint-Exupéry published his first short story in 1925 in Le Navire d'Argent, the
literary magazine from La Maison des Amis des Livres. "L'Aviateur" ("The Aviator")
introduced the character of Jacques Bernis, who returns in the author's first novel, the
1929 Courrier Sud (Southern Mail).
Curiously, the author's writings never refer to any of the contemporary Englishlanguage expatriate writers who frequented the same cafés, bookstores, and exhibitions
that he did. His silence can perhaps be explained because he spoke no English.
Nonetheless, some English-language writers were aware of him, if only tangentially. Jean
Prévost, the burly editor of Le Navire d'Argent, was Hemingway's French boxing partner
and an early supporter of both authors.vi Stuart Gilbert, the translator of Ulysses into
French, could not get a handle on Saint-Ex's simple, lyrical prose and had to ask Joyce
for help translating the 1931 novel Vol de Nuit (Night Flight) into English. Later, Henry
Miller described the hero of Night Flight as "a Jack London superman, with more
sophisticated ruminations" (Schiff 206).
Despite the thrill of finally being published at twenty-five, Saint-Exupéry was
generally not in good spirits. Lack of funds continued to plague him. His passionate love
affair and engagement with Louise de Vilmorin had fallen through. He felt he was
without direction, particularly compared to his Bossuet and Saint-Jean friends who were
raising families and making successes of themselves. In 1926, through his contact with
Abbé Sudour, his mentor at Bossuet, he got an interview with Beppo di Massimi and
Didier Daurat, the operations managers of Compagnie Latécoère, France's premier
commercial aviation company. Both managers had flown heroically in World War I,
where Massimi had known and discussed literature with Abbé Sudour in the trenches of
the Somme.
Commercial aviation was still in its infancy. After World War I, France had
thousands of idle aircraft and pilots. A young, visionary entrepreneur, Pierre-Georges
Latécoère, guessed correctly that the French government would subsidize an enterprise
that could speed up the delivery of mail from Paris to its French West African empire.
Casablanca was 700 miles away from France, and Dakar in Senegal, the administrative
capital of this empire, was 3000 miles away. At that time, a letter took two weeks to get
to Dakar. Compagnie Latécoère was born in 1918. The director established his
headquarters in the southwestern city of Toulouse, still the center of the powerful French
aviation industry.vii He flew the Breguet 14 because it was the most reliable plane,
breaking down about every 15,500 miles. The company began by developing a route
from Toulouse to Barcelona over the very tricky Pyrénées, down the Spanish coast to
Alicante, to Casablanca and/or Rabat in Morocco. After perfecting this route, they
expanded as far as Dakar in 1925. The Breguet could not fly the 2,300 miles non-stop
from Casablanca to Dakar, so refueling stops had to be established along the way,
sometimes in unfriendly places. The bases in Cap Juby and in Villa Cisneros were in
Spanish Rio de Oro, and the Spanish and the French were not always on good terms at
that time. The desert sand played havoc with the Breguet motors and fuel lines, and
planes regularly went down. Downed pilots were sometimes killed or taken hostage for
ransom by the local Moorish tribes. Nonetheless, the mail did go through, and
Compagnie Latécoère was a tremendous successviii. In the company's infancy, mail took
two days get to Casablanca from Toulouse and five to Dakar, which shaved off at least
five to nine days to the former and seven to nine to the latter. By 1930, Pierre-Georges
3
Latécoère's had developed faster planes with greater range, and it took just fifty-five
hours to fly from Toulouse to Dakar in optimum conditions.
Saint-Ex joined Compagnie Latécoère in 1926 and soon found the home and
direction he had been seeking. He particularly looked up to the pilots Henri Guillaumet
and Jean Mermoz. He admired Daurat's stern professionalism and the pilots' sense of duty
to their task. Saint-Ex dedicated his books to Daurat, Guillaumet, and Mermoz, and he
modeled some of his fictional characters on them. In his letters to his mother at this time,
he first introduced the idea of duty, working for a goal beyond himself. This concept of
duty is a central theme in much of his work.
After Saint-Exupéry had learned the ropes of the Toulouse-Dakar route, Daurat
picked him to head the refueling base at Cap Juby in 1927. The operations manager
needed a diplomat to work with the Spanish, a mechanic to repair and maintain the
planes, and a rescuer to find missing planes and to negotiate with the Moors. Saint-Ex fit
the bill perfectly. His noble birth impressed the Spanish authorities at their fort in Cap
Juby. After some initial doubt about Saint-Ex, who had arrived at his initial interview an
hour late, Daurat quickly noticed the author's natural talent as a mechanic. Saint-Ex was a
raconteur and got along well with the local Moors, even taking to wearing his bathrobe in
imitation of their dress. He spent thirteen months in Cap Juby and returned to France in
1928 a changed man. He had performed his mission well and found a home in the
Latécoère family. He was also a hero. He had secured the release of fourteen pilots held
hostage, for which he was nominated for the Légion d'Honneur, France's highest civilian
award. Further, he took advantage of his solitary existence to complete his first novel,
Courrier Sud (Southern Mail), published in 1929. It received mixed reviews. The
descriptions of flight were thrilling, but reviewers found the love story less convincing.
What kind of pilot was Saint-Exupéry? He was an extraordinary pilot when flying
was dangerous, but dangerous when it was routine. Mechanics loved him but did not
want to fly with him. Over the course of his career, he miraculously survived at least five
serious crashes. The most public was the crash in and subsequent trek across the Libyan
desert in 1936 that is featured in the 1939 Wind, Sand and Stars. He wrote as he flew,
discarding his drafts and drawings, which one enterprising member of the ground crew
collected from the cockpit floor.
So successful was Saint-Ex in Africa that Daurat picked him to head the
expansion of Compagnie Latécoère, now called Aéropostaleix, in South America. The
company had repeated its African success by significantly reducing the time mail took to
get from Europe to South America. In 1929, Saint-Ex set up operations in Buenos Aires,
a city he found very ugly. Over the next fifteen months, he developed routes within
Argentina, and from Argentina to Chile, Brazil, and much of South America. He loved
vast expanses-the sky while flying, the African desert, now the Patagonian glaciers.
After fifteen months in South America, he returned to France in 1931. He was on
top of the world. He had again successfully completed his assignment and was even more
firmly entrenched in the Aéropostale family. He was to receive the Légion d'Honneur for
his heroism at Cap Juby. He had completed his second novel, Vol de Nuit (Night Flight)
with an introduction by André Gide, France's leading author. The book was very well
received and won the Prix Fémina that year. Finally, he had fallen in love with a
capricious beauty from El Salvador, Consuelo Gomez Carillo, and they had returned to
France to be married. They established themselves in Paris, and Saint-Ex enjoyed the life
4
of a successful man of letters throughout the thirties. Tiring of the novel as a literary
form, he began writing essays about his experiences for newspapers and magazines.
Several troubling changes occurred during this decade, however. The couple's
marriage grew increasingly strained, and they were often apart, pursuing their separate
interests.x With the success of Night Flight, many Frenchmen questioned whether one
could be both a pilot and an author. It was an impossible combination in the French mind
but an inseparable one in Saint-Exupéry's. Most aristocrats pursued careers in diplomacy
or in the military, few were writers, and none were commercial pilots. Some of the
literary and aristocratic circles shunned him because they felt that neither an author nor a
count should have grease under his nails. Correctly or incorrectly, some of the
Aéropostale crew perceived that they were the subject of literary scrutiny and resented it.
As a result, some writers and pilots no longer wholeheartedly accepted him. He worked
sporadically for Aéropostale, but he stopped flying for them when their troubles began.
The company came under government scrutiny during a period when many commercial
and governmental scandals like the Stavisky Affair rocked the country. Latécoère was
punished (France has never embraced its successful entrepreneurs), and the state took
over partial ownership of the company in 1933, renaming it Air France. Finally, as much
of Europe was moving to the right, France was moving to the left. The French elected
their first socialist government, the Front Populaire under Léon Blum, in 1936.
Saint-Exupéry made his first voyage to the United States in January 1938 to
compete in a 9,000-mile race from Canada to the tip of South America. This trip was
more beneficial to his life as an author, however, because he met the four people who
would shape his future literary career. The founders of a new firm, Reynal and
Hitchcock, became his English language publishers. Maximillian Becker was a literary
agent who had the Belgian crime writer Georges Simenon in his stable and wanted
another French language writer
The mission to South America was a disaster. He crashed on take off in
Guatemala and incurred injuries that would plague him for the rest of his life. It was a
humiliating event, and he never wrote about it. So serious were his injuries that
Consuelo's wealthy South American family offered him a coffee plantation on which to
retire. He turned them down saying, “My job is to till the clouds” (Schiff 298).
He returned to the United States from South America in March 1938 for six
weeks. He met the fourth individual who would guide his literary career. Lewis
Galantière became St. Ex's primary American translator. He was a Sorbonne-educated
Federal Reserve banker who had translated Sherwood Anderson into French and was
famous for having found Hemingway his first apartment in Paris. Because Reynal and
Hitchcock did not speak French very well, Galantière took on the role of editor as well,
shaping works and giving suggestions for changes in both the English and French
editions.
Saint-Exupéry sailed back to France in May 1938 and continued work on the
book that would catapult him into literary stardom. Through the thirties he had worked
and reworked pieces from his flying experiences that highlighted man's heroic and noble
nature. This reworking was done through storytelling at parties and cafés. The pieces
were fragmentary and not well unified. Saint-Ex's friend André Gide, the future Nobel
Prize winner, gave him Joseph Conrad's Mirror of the Sea, another collection of
5
seemingly disparate pieces about sailing crafted into a unified whole. This model gave St.
Ex the confidence to continue with Terre des hommes (Wind, Sand and Stars).
Saint-Exupéry came to the United States a second time in February 1939 to work
with Galantière on this collection. The collaboration in New York is worth relating in
some depth to highlight an example of the workings of writers and their translators and to
examine the nature of translation itself. Because of his consultations with Galantière,
Saint-Ex clearly had an English translation in mind as he was writing his French text. The
title of the French collection, Terre des hommes, has a philosophical lean to it. These
three simple words convey a very clear idea in French about mankind’s common
humanity, the word “hommes” meaning both "men" and "mankind". Saint-Exupéry
considered the desire and necessity for man to commune with other men to be a primary
driving force. It is difficult to find an appropriate English translation that captures this
idea so simply and succinctly. Thinking about the American market, Reynal and
Hitchcock wanted something less philosophical with more action. They therefore entitled
the work Wind, Sand and Stars, which captures the setting of the tales but ignores the
critical theme of humanity in the French title. The American edition also eliminated a
four-paragraph eulogy dedicated to Jean Mermoz, who had died establishing the Europe
to South America postal routes. On the other hand, not all differences between the
English and French versions shortchanged the English. Galantière thought that a piece
was needed to unify the whole collection. He encouraged the author to include his wellknown piece on flying through a cyclone in South America. Saint-Exupéry wanted to
include it in the French edition, but Gallimard had already sent it to press in March. The
English edition did, however, include this essay. Thus we have these two works that are
theoretically a French collection of essays and its American translation. In fact we have
two works with different titles and slightly different content, partially based on cultural
differences, partially based on publication deadlines. Regardless of differences, both won
prestigious awards in 1939. Terre des hommes won the Grand Prix du Roman de
l’Académie française, and Wind, Sand and Stars took the National Book Award. Simone
de Beauvoir told Jean-Paul Sartre that it was the first book in a long time that had made
her dream (Schiff 312). In America, he became known as the “Conrad of the skies” even
though he had not flown a mail route in eight years and would never fly in peacetime
again.
Fearing that war was inevitable, he sailed back to France in August 1939, after
spending the summer at Middlebury College in Vermont as a visiting artist whose
engaging personality was his contribution to the program. He rejoined the air force as a
captain. He was too old to fly fighter planes and refused to fly a bomber, so he was
attached to the 2/33 reconnaissance squad. In May 1940, the Battle of France began and
ended thirty-eight days later when France fell on June 18. During this time, Saint-Ex flew
reconnaissance flights over northern France despite the futility of trying to combat a far
superior German air force and the high mortality rate of these missions. With the fall of
France he demobilized and went into exile in the United States for two and a half years. It
was the last time he set foot on mainland France.
He arrived in New York City for his longest stay on New Year’s Eve 1940. He
met the filmmaker Jean Renoir on the Atlantic crossing. These two national treasures,
who were both gregarious and loved the pleasures of the table, became instant friends.
They shared a passion for flying. Renoir had been a fighter pilot in World War I. Flying
6
is a central component of his two most famous films, The Grand Illusion and Rules of the
Game.xi The pilot hero of Rules could even be Saint-Exupéry himself-a hero in the air
and a misfit on the ground. Saint-Exupéry admired Renoir’s films and gave him a copy of
Terre des hommes. Renoir wanted to make a film of it and imagined that it would be the
most beautiful film of his career. Saint-Exupéry spent some of 1941 in Hollywood with
Renoir, trying, without success, to get the film made.xii
The festive and brilliantly lit New York that the author arrived in on New Year's
Eve 1940 could not have been more different from gloomy, war-torn Europe. Isolation
describes the author’s state for most of this period in the United States. He was
devastated by France’s loss. The last of his flying comrades from the early Latécoère
days, his mentor Guillaumet, hero of Terre des hommes, had been killed as Saint-Ex was
crossing the Atlantic. The author spoke no English and refused to learn. Aside from its
electrical gadgets, he did not think much of the United States. He thought that a country
that could produce a state of the art washing machine could spend some of that same
energy saving France. He was isolated from much of the large, bickering exiled French
community in the United States because he refused to take sides for either the Free
French government led by De Gaulle or the collaborationist Vichy government of Pétain.
Later, De Gaulle insulted him publicly by excluding his name from the authors who had
helped France in the war. André Breton, the surrealist also in exile, questioned his
patriotism, to which Saint-Exupéry responded “Half of my friends are dead, and all of
yours are living” (Schiff 350).
Further, Reynal and Hitchcock knew they had a best-selling author who had no
ongoing literary project. They wanted him to write a book on the fall of France, a popular
subject but not one on which he was initially keen. In 1941, he did write about his
reconnaissance missions during the Battle of France. His writing again was philosophical,
highlighting the importance of duty and sacrifice for the greater good. For the American
edition, Reynal and Hitchcock again wanted more action and sought to market the work
as a tale of a day in the life of a World War II pilot. Galantière translated in English as
Saint-Exupéry wrote in French. In fact, Reynal and Hitchcock had the English title,
Flight to Arras, before the author had the French title. Ultimately, Consuelo suggested
the French title that stuck, Pilote de Guerre.
In February 1942, for the first time, the French and English versions of a SaintExupéry book came out simultaneously. Further, they were both published in the United
States. At this time, the main publishing houses in France, including Saint-Exupéry's
Gallimard, had almost shut down. Only pro-German publications continued, like La
Nouvelle Revue Française, Gallimard’s literary review, because everything had to be
screened by a German censor. French language publishing established itself in New York
City, which explains, in part, the simultaneous publication of these works. Flight to Arras
became one of the top ten bestsellers of 1942. Saint-Exupéry inscribed a copy for
President Roosevelt in which he wrote "For President Roosevelt, whose country is
assuming the immense task of saving the world" (Schiff 364). This book accomplished
what Saint-Exupéry had originally come to the United States to do. It was the single most
important piece of propaganda to raise France's prestige after its fall. He was now a hero
and defender of France as both a pilot and a writer. He was desperate for Frenchmen in
France to read his work. A copy was smuggled into France at the end of 1942 that
Gallimard published after the German censors removed one sentence that, curiously, has
7
never been reinserted. ("They were all fools, the orderly who misplaced his gloves no less
than Hitler who had unleashed the war" [Schiff n,365]). All 2,000 copies sold in a week,
but the Germans clamped down on future printings because of the book's praise for a
Jewish pilot that they had overlooked on first examination.
In March 1942, he met Silvia Reinhardt, one of true loves of his life. He was 42
and she 28. Neither spoke the other's language, which was immaterial to Saint-Ex
because he thought that language often confuses and that true communication takes place
at a level beyond language.
Reynal and Hitchcock were again worried because Saint-Ex had no literary
project after Arras. They also happened to publish PL Travers, the author of the highly
successful Mary Poppins series. With this success in mind, Elizabeth Reynal suggested
that Saint-Exupéry write a children's book about this little figure that he had been
drawing for several years. The result was Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince).
He wrote and drew Le Petit Prince primarily in Silvia's Fifth Avenue apartment in
the summer and fall of 1942. His friends, his wife, and he himself inspired characters in
the tale. Silvia is the wise fox who supplies most of the most memorable lines. "What is
essential is invisible to the eye" (The Little Prince 70). "You become responsible,
forever, for what you have tamed" (71). Consuelo was the inspiration for the troublesome
rose who hides half-truths with a cough and is the reason why the little prince must leave
his asteroid. The author is both the little prince, the eternal child, and the narrator, the
aviator who crashes in the desert and humors the little prince's whims. The landscape of
Saint-Ex's travels became the setting for the book: volcanoes from Patagonia, baobob
trees from Dakar, the African desert from his 1936 crash. In April 1943, the French and
English texts were again published simultaneously in the United States. Le Petit Prince
was only published in France in 1946, two years after the author’s death.
Surprisingly, by fall, the English version had far outsold the French version,
30,000 to 7,000 copies. Orson Welles admired Saint-Exupéry and had used parts of his
books in radio broadcasts during the war. Welles bought the screen rights to The Little
Prince, but nothing came of it.
A week after the publication of The Little Prince on April 13, 1943, SaintExupéry left the United States for good. Americans had landed in North Africa, and he
immediately set out to help in the war effort. He rejoined his 2/33 reconnaissance squad
in Africa and was given permission, through the intervention of Eisenhower, to learn to
fly the Lockheed P-38 Lightning. He was 42 years old and much beyond the age limit for
a fighter pilot. This plane was far more sophisticated than anything he had flown, and he
learned slowly. The Americans were weary of the French in general and of Saint-Ex in
particular. The French had very few hours of training compared to their American
counterparts. The author is supposed to have said “Let me fly. I want to die for France!”
to which his American superior replied, “I don’t give a damn if you die for France or not,
but you’re not going to do so in one of our planes ” (Schiff 411).
On July 31, 1944, he took off from Corsica in a P-38 and disappeared. His
disappearance had intrigued the world until part of the mystery was finally solved in
1998. First, his bracelet was found at the bottom of the Mediterranean off Marseilles.
Then, his P-38 was discovered nearby in 2000, the centenary of his birth.
The last mystery to which no one will ever know the answer unless new
information surfaces surrounds that last fateful day. Because of conflicting reports, it’s
8
unclear whether Saint-Exupéry had official clearance for his flight. He had been
grumbling for several years about being fed up and wanting to disappear. He was in
constant pain from earlier injuries. A fortuneteller had predicted that he would die in the
waves. Considering his state of mind, the question of suicide has been raised. Those who
believe he did kill himself point to a few passages in The Little Prince that prove he
planned to end his life. The little prince sees forty-four sunsets on his asteroid, and SaintExupéry disappeared a month after his forty-fourth birthday.
Saint-Exupéry was a hero in his lifetime and in his death. Dying for France was
consistent with his ideals and those of his class. He was one of the few French writers to
die in this war compared to the hundreds who had died in World War I. Today, he is
considered a national treasure. In 1993, the French government featured him and his
creations on the fifty-franc bill. He has been memorialized on stamps of several nations.
The chateau in Saint Maurice has become a museum devoted to Saint-Exupéry, and the
airport in Lyons designed by Santiago Calatrava bears the author's name. Today, The
Little Prince still sells 125,000 copies annually in the United States and 300,000 in
France (Schiff 445). This presentation has tried to show, however, that Saint-Exupéry
deserves to be known for more than this single work.
9
Notes
i
The "de" is called the particule in French and signifies aristocratic heritage.
Antoine was later so taken with the desert because he imagined the teeming, hidden life beneath the
surface of the sands. The little prince, stranded in the desert, refers to the treasures underneath the sand.
"What makes it beautiful," said the little prince, "is that somewhere it hides a well…" (75).
iii
Stacy Schiff, the author of a very fine biography of Saint-Exupéry, states that in Le Mans one can walk
from the Rue Wilbur Wright, down the Avenue Bollée, to the rue Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. (52)
iv
This author's interest in Saint-Exupéry was initially sparked because he graduated from this same
institution.
v
A military career was a traditional one for the aristocracy and Saint-Exupéry did have distant relatives
who had pursued such a career. Given his interest in flying, however, his interest of a naval career is
puzzling.
vi
Saint-Exupéry's style and themes resemble Hemingway's in certain respects. They were both minimalists
who extolled nature and man's relation with it. However, Saint-Ex's conception of duty is closer to that of
the seventeenth-century La Princesse de Clèves than it is to that portrayed in A Farewell to Arms.
vii
The Concorde was and the Airbus is built at Aérospatiale in Toulouse. The author's interest in SaintExupéry is partially a result of his own father's involvement in the development of both planes at
Aérospatiale in the 60s and 70s.
viii
In 1920, Compagnie Latécoère flew 200,000 pieces of mail. In 1930, after both the African and South
American routes were operational, the company carried 32 million pieces (Schiff 146).
ix
The French industrialist based in South America, Marcel Bouilloux-Lafont, bought Compagnie Latécoère
in 1927 and changed its name to Compagnie Générale Aéropostale.
x
Lewis Gallantière, Saint-Exupéry's translator and no fan of Consuelo, described her as "surrealism made
flesh" (Schiff 374).
xi
The downed pilot, played by Jean Gabin, is wearing Renoir’s World War I flying coat at the beginning of
the Grand Illusion.
xii
In April 1941, Saint-Exupéry flew to Los Angeles to work with Renoir on ideas for the film of Wind,
Sand and Stars and on getting it made. He was not entirely unfamiliar with Hollywood because his novel
Night Flight and his screenplay Anna-Marie had been made into films there. Wind, Sand and Stars is a
collection of essays based on flying episodes from his own and his colleagues' experiences. As such, it does
not have a traditional narrative or plot. There is a series of several characters in the disparate essays but no
central character. Renoir and Saint-Exupéry decided that the author’s crash in and the escape from the
Libyan desert in 1936 should be the central narrative line, into which would be woven the character of the
pilot Bernis, the fictional hero of Southern Mail. They could not, however, come up with an ending for the
film. At the same time, they were also trying to get backing to make the film. Renoir was under contract to
Darryl Zanuck and had given him a copy of the book, but he was not sufficiently moved to make a film of
it. They had even less success with an influential agent because Saint-Exupéry was so put off by the agent's
hypocrisy that he refused to be social to the man and pouted. (Saint- Exupéry was appalled by the agent’s
wall of beautiful leather bound books with fancy titles but no pages.) Usually Saint-Exupéry was the life of
the party, but this eternal child would also sulk when unhappy. Despite Renoir’s heroic efforts, they could
not get the film made, and Saint-Exupéry returned to New York.
ii
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Bibliography
Estang, Luc. Saint-Exupéry par lui-même. Paris: Seuil, 1958.
Renoir, Jean. Ma Vie et mes films. Paris: Flammarion, 1974.
Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de. Airman's Odyssey (Wind,Sand and Stars, Night Flight, Flight
to Arras). New York: Harcourt Brace Javonovich, 1984.
-----. The Little Prince. New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1943.
-----. Southern Mail. New York: Harcourt Brace Javonovich, 1971.
Schiff, Stacy. Saint-Exupéry. New York: Owl Books, Henry Holt and Company, 2006.
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