Antoine de Saint Exupéry was a French aviator and writer, most famous for writing
Le Petit Prince. He is also well known for his books about aviation adventures, including
Vol de Nuit, "Night Flight" and "Wind, Sand and Stars."
While not precisely autobiographical, much of Saint Exupéry's work is inspired by his experiences as a pilot. One exception is Le Petit Prince, a poetic self-illustrated tale in which a pilot stranded in the desert meets a young prince from a tiny asteroid. Le Petit Prince is a philosophical story, including societal criticism and remarking on the strangeness of the adult world.Saint Exupéry was born in Lyon on
le 29 juin 1900 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 before Antoine was four. After failing his final exams at preparatory school, Saint Exupéry entered
L'école des Beaux-Arts to study architecture. In 1921, he began his military service with
le 2 ème régiment des chasseurs (light cavalry), and was then sent to Strasbourg for training as a pilot. He obtained his license in 1922 and was offered transfer to the air force. Bowing to the objections of the family of his fiancée (the future novelist Louise Leveque de Vilmorin) he did not accept the appointment to the air force, settling instead in Paris where he took an office job. The couple ultimately broke off the engagement, and Saint-Exupéry worked at several jobs over the next few years.
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. 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.
L'Aviateur, ("The Aviator"), Saint Exupéry's first story, 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. 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.
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.
Vol de Nuit covers his experiences with
L' aéropostale. That same year, at Grasse, Saint Exupéry married Consuelo Gómez Carillo, a widowed Salvadoran writer and artist. It was a stormy union, as Saint Exupéry traveled frequently and indulged in numerous affairs, most notably with the Frenchwoman Nelly de Vogüé. De Vogüé became Saint Exupéry's literary executrix after his death, and also wrote a Saint Exupéry biography under the pseudonym Pierre Chevrier.
Consuelo Gómez CarilloOn
le 30 décembre 1935 at 14:45 after a flight of 19 hours and 38 minutes Saint Exupéry and his navigator, André Prévot, crashed in the Libyan Sahara desert en route to Saigon. 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 prospect of rapid dehydration in the Sahara. They had no idea of their location. According to his memoir, "Wind, Sand and Stars," their sole supplies were grapes, one orange, and a ration of wine. What Saint Exupéry himself told the press shortly after rescue was that the men only had a thermos of sweet coffee, chocolate, and a handful of crackers, enough to sustain them for one day. They experienced visual and auditory hallucinations. By day three, they were so dehydrated they ceased to sweat. On day four, a Bedouin on a camel discovered them, saving Saint Exupéry and Prévot's lives. Saint Exupéry's fable
Le Petit Prince, which begins with a pilot being marooned in the desert, is in part a reference to this experience.
Saint Exupéry continued to write and fly until the beginning of
la deuxième guerre mondiale. During the war, he initially flew with the GR II/33 reconnaissance squadron of
L'armée de l'Air. After France's 1940 armistice with Germany, he traveled to the United States. The Saint Exupérys lived in a penthouse apartment in New York City and a rented mansion in Asharoken on Long Island's north shore between
janvier 1941 et avril 1943. He wrote
Le Petit Prince in Asharoken in the summer and fall of 1942; the manuscript was completed by October.
After living just over two years in North America, Saint Exupéry returned to Europe to fly with the Free French Forces and fight with the Allies in a Mediterranean-based squadron. Then 43, he was older than most men assigned such duties; he also suffered pain, due to his many fractures from air crashes. He was assigned with a number of other pilots to P-38 "Lightnings."
Saint Exupéry's final assignment was to collect intelligence on German troop movements in and around the Rhone Valley preceding the Allied invasion of southern France. On the evening of
le 31 juillet 1944, he left from an airbase on Corsica, and was never seen again. A woman reported having watched a plane crash around noon of
le 1 aout near the Bay of Carqueiranne off Toulon. An unidentifiable body wearing French colors was found several days later and buried in Carqueiranne that
septembre.
In 1998, a fisherman named Jean-Claude Bianco found a silver identity bracelet bearing the names of Saint Exupéry and his wife Consuelo and his publishers, Reynal & Hitchcock and was hooked to a piece of fabric, presumably from Saint Exupéry's flight suit.
Saint Exupéry, a P-38 "Lightning", et le Petit Prince.In 2000, a diver named Luc Vanrell found a P-38 Lightning crashed in the seabed off the coast of Marseille. The remains of the aircraft were recovered in
octobre 2003. On
le 7 avril 2004, investigators from the French Underwater Archaeological Department confirmed that the plane was, indeed, Saint Exupéry's F-5B reconnaissance variant. No marks or holes attributable to gunfire were found. However this was not considered significant as only a small portion of the aircraft was recovered. In
juin 2004, the fragments were given to the Museum of Air and Space in Le Bourget. 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.
In
mars 2008, a former Luftwaffe pilot, 85-year-old Horst Rippert, told
La Provence, a Marseille newspaper, that he engaged and downed a P-38 Lightning on
le 31 juillet 1944 in the area where Saint Exupéry's plane was found. According to Rippert, he was on a reconnaissance mission over the Mediterranean sea when he saw a P-38 with a French emblem behind him near Toulon. Rippert says he opened fire at the P-38, which crashed into the sea.
After the war, Horst Rippert became a television journalist and led the ZDF sports department. Rippert says he came to believe that he had probably shot down Saint Exupéry, a writer Rippert knew of because he had read his books during his youth. Rippert says Saint Exupéry was one of his favorite authors. Rippert has written a book discussing the alleged Saint Exupéry shootdown. Rippert's story is unverifiable, and has met with criticism from some German and French investigators. The diver who found the plane believes Saint Exupéry committed suicide.
Until the euro was introduced in 2002, Saint Exupéry's image and his drawing of tLe Petit Prince appeared on France's 50-franc note.
