Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Life

Count Antoine Marie Roger de Saint-Exupéry was born in Lyon into an old family of provincial nobility, the third of five children of Count Jean de Saint-Exupéry, an insurance broker who died when his famous son was three, and his wife, Marie de Foscolombe. One of his ancestors fought with the Americans at Yorktown.

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

By 1926, he 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 were more like accountants than pilots. He worked on the Aéropostale between Toulouse and Dakar. His first tale L'Aviateur (The Aviator) was published in the magazine Le Navire d'argent. In 1928, he published his first book, Courrier-Sud (Southern Mail), and flew the Casablanca/Dakar route. He became the director of Cap Juby airfield in Rio de Oro, Sahara. In 1929, Saint-Exupéry moved to South America, where he was appointed director of the Aeroposta Argentina Company. In 1931, Vol de Nuit (Night Flight), which won the Prix Femina, was published. He kept writing and flying until the beginning of the war.

On April 11, 1931, he married Consuelo Suncin Sandoval de Gómez, a widowed Salvadoran artist and writer who was the model for the temperamental Rose in Le Petit Prince. Theirs was a stormy union as Saint-Exupéry traveled frequently and indulged in numerous affairs.

During World War II, he initially flew in the French GC II/33 reconnaissance squadron. Then he would escape to New York City, but came back to fight with the Allies in a squadron based in the Mediterranean. Now age 44, he was about to quit but agreed to one last mission: to collect data on German troop movements in the Rhone River Valley. He took off the night of July 31, 1944, and was never seen again. A lady reported having seen a plane crash around noon of August 1 near the Bay of Carqueiranne. A body wearing a French uniform was found several days later and was buried in Carqueiranne that September.

In 1998, a fisherman found what was reported to be Saint-Exupéry's silver chain bracelet in the ocean south of Marseille. At first it was thought a hoax, but it was later positively identified. On April 7, 2004, officials confirmed that the twisted wreckage of a Lockheed P-38 Lightning, found on the seabed off the coast of Marseille in 2000, is Saint-Exupéry's. The discovery is akin to solving the mystery of where Amelia Earhart's plane went down in the Pacific Ocean in 1937. However, the cause of the crash remains a mystery. He was most likely shot down by the German Focke-Wulf Fw 190 fighter of Robert Heichelle, who claimed shooting down an aggressive Lightning.

Works

If not always autobiographical, Saint-Exupéry's work is greatly inspired by his experiences as a pilot. An exception is The Little Prince, his most famous book, a poetic illustrated tale in which he imagines himself stranded in the desert where he meets The Little Prince, a young boy from a tiny asteroid. In many ways The Little Prince is a philosophical story, with emphasis on criticizing society and the excesses 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
  

  Notes

• Saint-Exupéry and his wife were portrayed by Bruno Ganz and Miranda Richardson in the British film "Saint-Ex."
• His wife, Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry, wrote "The Tale of the Rose," a year or two after his disappearance, with the pain of loss still fresh in her heart. When completed, she put it away in a trunk. With her death in 1979, it was still buried. Two decades later, the manuscript finally came to light when José Martinez-Fructuoso, who was her heir and worked for her for many years, and his wife, Martine, discovered it in the trunks' myriad content. Alan Vircondelet, author of a biography of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, edited it smoothing her French and dividing it into chapters. Its publication in France in 2000, a full century after Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's birth on June 29, 1900, became a national sensation. It has been translated into sixteen languages. The heroic fighter pilot, now has to make room for the impassioned new voice of his wife, who in the fifty years since his death, has been virtually airbrushed out of the picture.
• Saint-Exupéry is commemorated by a plaque in the Panthéon.
• Until the euro was introduced in 2002, his image appeared on France's 50-franc note.
• A French lycée in Santiago, Chile is called after him.
  

  Named after Saint-Exupéry

• Saint-Exupéry International Airport in Lyon
• Asteroid 2578 Saint-Exupéry, named after Saint-Exupéry in 1975; see also asteroid moon Petit-Prince

  External links and references

• Saint-Exupéry: A Biography, Stacy Schiff, Pimlico 1994
• http://www.saint-exupery.org - Official site
• The Little Prince - Full (English) text with illustrations
• http://www.little-prince.org - Children's site
• From The Murky Depths, Wall Street Journal, April 15, 2004
• The Tale of the Rose, Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry, Random House, 2001