Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Sculpture of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and the Little Prince in Lyon

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (pronounced [ɑ̃twan də sɛ̃.tɛg.zy.pe.ʀi]) (June 29 1900 – presumably July 31 1944) was a French writer and aviator. One of his most famous works is Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince). He disappeared on the night of July 31, 1944 while flying on a mission to collect data on German troop movements.

Biography

Count Antoine Jean-Baptiste 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. His wife was named Marie de Fonscolombe.

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 was ultimately broken 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 in 1923.

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.

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

In 1931, at Grasse, Saint-Exupéry married Consuelo Suncin Sandoval Zeceña of Gómez, a twice-widowed writer and Salvadorian artist. Theirs was a stormy union as Saint-Exupéry traveled frequently and indulged in numerous affairs.

Saint-Exupéry kept writing and flying until the beginning of World War II. During the war, he initially flew in the French GC II/33 reconnaissance squadron for France. After France's fall to the Nazis he traveled to the United States, settling in Asharoken, New York on Long Island's north shore and then in Quebec City for a time in 1942.^[1][2]

Disappearance in flight

After his time in North America, Saint-Exupéry returned to Europe to fly with the Free French and fight with the Allies in a squadron based in the Mediterranean. Then aged 44, he flew his 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. The body of a serviceman wearing a French uniform was found several days later and was buried in Carqueiranne that September.

Over 50 years later, in 1998, a fisherman found what was reported to be Saint-Exupéry's silver chain bracelet in the ocean to the east of the island of Riou, south of Marseille. At first it was thought to be a hoax, but it was later positively identified. It was engraved with the names of his wife and his publishers, Reynal & Hitchcock, and was hooked to a piece of fabric from his pilot's suit.

On April 7, 2004, investigators from the French Underwater Archaeological Department confirmed that the twisted wreckage of a Lockheed F-5 photo-reconnaissance aircraft (a version of the P-38 Lightning fighter aircraft), found on the seabed off the coast of Marseille in 2000 and extracted in October 2003, was Saint-Exupéry's. The discovery was 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 remained a mystery.

Today it is regarded as very improbable that Saint-Exupéry was shot down by a German pilot. The German aerial combat records of July 31, 1944 do not list the shooting down of an enemy aircraft in the Mediterranean on that day. Besides, the wreckage of Saint-Exupéry's F-5 did not show any traces of shooting or aerial combat. Therefore, it is regarded as most probable that the crash was caused by a technical failure. However, some people believe that Saint-Exupéry may have committed suicide, and a diver named Luc Vanrell (who found the crashed plane) is one of few in France inclined to voice publicly the theory that Saint-Exupéry killed himself. It is also said that Saint Exupery was rather undisciplined with his use of in-flight oxygen, that he did not regulate it carefully, and may have run out before returning to base, thus passing out and consequently crashing.

Literary 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 (based on actual events, see below) 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 follies of the adult world. Nevertheless, The Little Prince contains elements from several earlier stories. The "temperamental rose" in the story was based on his wife Consuelo.

• 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

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
• A French-language lycée in Santiago, Chile.
• A French-language lycée in Madrid, Spain
• A French-language lycée in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso
• A French-language lycée in Créteil, France
• A French-language lycée in San Salvador, El Salvador
• A French-language lycée in Rabat, Morocco
• A French-language high school in Montreal, Canada
• A mountain in Patagonia, Argentina

Literary references

• 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."
• His 1939 book Terre des hommes was the inspiration for the theme of Expo 67 (in Montreal), which was also translated into English as "Man and His World".

Trivia

• 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). Supposedly the crash site is located in the Wadi Natrum. They were attempting to fly from Paris to Saigon faster than anyone before them had for a prize of 150,000 francs. They both survived the accident, and were faced with the frightening prospect of rapid dehydration in the Sahara. Their maps were primitive and vague, and therefore useless. To compound the problem, the duo had no idea where they were. Grapes, an orange, and wine sustained the men for one day, and after that, they had nothing. Both of the men began seeing mirages hallucinations. Between the second and third day, the men were so dehydrated, they ceased to sweat. Finally, on the fourth day, a Bedouin on a camel discovered them and administered native dehydration treatment, saving Saint-Exupéry and Prévot's lives. In The Little Prince, when Saint-Exupéry talks about being marooned in the desert in a damaged aircraft, he is in fact making a reference to this experience in his life. Saint-Exupéry also talks about this ordeal in detail, in his book, Wind, Sand, and Stars.
• 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, then put the manuscript away in a trunk. Two decades after her death in 1978, 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 trunk. Alan Vircondelet, author of a biography of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, edited it, improving 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 overlooked.
• Saint-Exupéry is commemorated by a plaque in the Panthéon.
• Until the euro was introduced in 2002, his image and his drawing of the Little Prince appeared on France's 50-franc note.
• 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 Little Prince
• Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry
• The Bevin House
• Aviators
• Missing persons
• List of people who have disappeared

Notes

1. ^ Schiff, Stacy (Feb 7, 2006). Saint-Exupery. Owl Books, page 379 of 529. ISBN: 0805079130.
2. ^ Brown, Hannibal. The Country Where The Stones Fly (documentary research). Visions Of A Little Prince. Retrieved on 2006-10-30.

References

• Stacy Schiff (1994). Saint-Exupéry: A Biography. Pimlico.
• Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry (2001). The Tale of the Rose. Random House.
• "From The Murky Depths", by Benjamin Ivry in the Wall Street Journal, April 15, 2004.

External links

• Official Site of Saint Exupery - French language

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