Antoine de Saint Exupéry
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Categories: Cleanup from October 2007 | All pages needing cleanup | French aviators | Aviators killed in aircraft crashes | French memoirists | French novelists | French children's writers | Prix Femina winners | World War II pilots | People from Lyon | Disappeared people | Missing in action | 1900 births | 1944 deaths | Writers who illustrated their own writing
Antoine de Saint Exupéry[1] (pronounced [ɑ̃twan də sɛ̃tɛgzypeˈʀi]) (June 29 1900 – presumably July 31 1944) was a French writer and aviator. His most famous work is Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince). He disappeared on the night of July 31, 1944, while on a mission to collect intelligence on German troop movements.
BiographyAntoine 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 his fiancée's family—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. His 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. Image:St-ExuperyPlaque.jpg
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. 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. Grapes, one orange, and a ration of wine (as he romantically wrote later in "Wind, Sand and Stars" ) were their sole supplies. 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 (see S. Schiff's excellent "Saint Exupery", New York,1994, p.258), enough to sustain them for one day; beyond that, they had nothing. They had visual and auditory hallucinations. Between days two and 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. In The Little Prince, when Saint Exupéry speaks of being marooned in the desert in a damaged aircraft, he is making clear and bracing reference to these moments. Saint Exupéry also details the crash, wandering and rescue in his less poetic Wind, Sand, and Stars. 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. After France's armistice with Germany he traveled to the United States. The Saint-Exupérys lived in a penthouse apartment at 240 Central Park South[2] in New York City and Asharoken, NY[3] on Long Island's north shore between January, 1941 and April, 1943, and also in Quebec City for a time in 1942.[4][5] He wrote The Little Prince in New York and Asharoken in the summer and fall of 1942; the manuscript was completed by October. Disappearance in flightFollowing 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". [6] His final assignment was to collect intelligence on German troop movements in and around the Rhone River Valley. On the cool, soft evening of July 31, 1944, he left from an airbase on Corsica, and was never seen again. 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. Although German aerial combat records of July 31, 1944 do not list the shooting down of enemy aircraft in the Mediterranean, there is a tacit, popular and romantic assumption that Saint Exupéry was intercepted by a German fighter pilot. More than half a century later, in 1998, a fisherman 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. As a career summary, it's one the author might have acknowledged and appreciated. 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.[1] On April 7, 2004, investigators from the French Underwater Archaeological Department confirmed that the plane was, indeed, Saint Exupéry's. The wreckage showed traces neither of shooting nor aerial combat. Among numerous theories are that the crash was caused by a mechanical failure in engines or oxygen supply, or that the author committed suicide. The suicide theory is supported by the fact that the location of the plane indicates that it was very far off course, and appeared to have crashed vertically into the sea at a time when St. Exupery was depressed about being labelled a traitor by the deGaulle leadership of the Free French [2]. 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. Honors
Literary worksWhile 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.
Literary references
Film
See alsoNotes
References
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