Welcome, curious minds! Do you know the true story of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the French aviator and writer who wrote 'The Little Prince' and mysteriously disappeared while flying over the Mediterranean? Who does not know 'The Little Prince', the most read and most translated book written in French in history?
Since it was published in 1943, more than 140 million copies have been sold worldwide. Unfortunately, its author, the French aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, did not know of the success that the work would reap: he disappeared just a year later, after taking off from Corsica on a reconnaissance mission, within the framework of World War II . World.
In tribute to his literary work, throughout this video we will show you some of his most famous phrases. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was born in Lyon in 1900, into an aristocratic family. He lived a happy childhood with his four brothers, but when he was only four years old he suffered the misfortune of losing his father, the victim of a cerebral hemorrhage.
In Antoine's upbringing , his governess, the Austrian Paula Hentschel, played a very important role. She lived with the five siblings until they were adults. Antoine spent his early years living in castles, such as La Môle, which was owned by his maternal grandmother, or Saint-Maurice-de-Rémens, which belonged to his aunt.
He first studied with the Brothers of the Christian Schools, in Lyon, and later, when the family moved to Le Mans, he continued his studies at the Jesuit college of Notre-Dame-de-Sainte-Croix. He never excelled in studies, and his teachers considered him dreamy and undisciplined. And it is that Antoine was interested in adventure.
Since he was 12 years old, back in 1912, he was fascinated by airplanes, and on his summer vacations he used to go by bicycle to visit the Ambérieu-en-Bugey aerodrome, a town near Lyon. There he questioned the mechanics about the operation of those primitive aircraft. He managed to convince a pilot named Gabriel Salvez that his mother, Marie, had given him permission to fly, and thus he managed to take to the skies for the first time.
When the First World War broke out, his mother was appointed head nurse at the Ambérieu-en-Bugey military hospital and, the following year, in 1915, she sent Antoine and another of her sons, François, to study at a Marianist school. in Fribourg, Switzerland. Despite his poor grades, Antoine achieved his baccalaureate degree in 1917; but that same year, during the summer, his brother François, with whom he was very close and suffered from joint rheumatism, died of pericarditis.
That loss marked his transition to adult life. For the next three years he tried to enter the naval school, but on all three occasions he failed the oral exam. He spent a few years without direction or life project, writing poems, drawing and accepting various sporadic jobs, such as being an extra in a performance of the opera 'Quo Vadis'.
Until in April 1921 he began his military service, which at that time, in France, lasted two years. He served in the 2nd Strasbourg Aviation Regiment, as a mechanic, and began taking civilian flying lessons at his own expense. After obtaining the civil pilot's license, he was finally able to take the military pilot course; but since there was no flight school at the Strasbourg base, he had to wait to be assigned to the 37th Moroccan regiment.
There, in Casablanca, he obtained his military pilot's license at the end of 1921. A year and a half later, already as a second lieutenant in the 34th regiment, in Le Bourget, he suffered his first plane crash; and it was serious, because he fractured his skull. As a result of his injury, he was withdrawn from service and a period of great boredom began for him.
He first worked for one company as a production controller and then for another as a truck salesman. But in a year and a half he only managed to sell one truck, so he wisely decided to quit. In 1926, finally, he went back to doing what he was really passionate about: flying.
He was hired as a pilot by the Latécoére airmail company, which would later become Aéropostale. Saint-Exupéry 's job was to cover the line between Toulouse and Dakar, passing through Barcelona, Malaga and Tetouan. At that time he saw his story published for the first time.
It was entitled 'The Aviator', was based on his own experiences and appeared in the April 1926 issue of the French magazine 'Le Navire d'argent', of which the writer Jean Prévost, a friend of his, was the editorial secretary. At the end of 1927 he was appointed station chief at Cape Juby, in Morocco, with the task of smoothing relations with the natives and the Spanish. There, surrounded by solitude and desert, he wrote 'Correo del Sur', his first published novel, which was published in 1929.
That work, as you can imagine, was also inspired by his work and his emotions as a pilot. Already in 1929 he went to South America, with the task of developing the Aéropostale lines and making them reach Patagonia as director of the company Aeroposta Argentina, a subsidiary of Aéropostale. During his stay of a couple of years in Argentina, Saint-Exupéry published his second work, 'Night Flight', a long story in which he poetically evokes the work of those brave pilots who faced storms and dozens of dangers flying over vast unexplored terrains in planes that had nothing to do with the current ones.
At that time, the slightest mechanical failure could be lethal. While in Buenos Aires, Saint-Exupéry met the Salvadoran writer and artist Consuelo Suncín, who came from a family of wealthy landowners and was a highly intelligent woman. Consuelo, who was 30 years old, one year younger than Saint-Exupéry, had married for the first time in the United States at 21, just after coming of age, with a young man of Mexican origin who worked as a clerk in a grocery store.
paintings. That marriage did not last long, and Consuelo remarried, this time to a Guatemalan diplomat and writer named Enrique Gómez Carrillo, almost thirty years her senior. Unfortunately, Carrillo died of a stroke just a few months after the wedding.
And Consuelo, a widow at only 25 years old and with a significant fortune, went to live in Buenos Aires, where, as we have mentioned, she met Saint-Exupéry, whom she married in 1931, in Nice. They had gone to France because, at the time, the Aéropostale company was going bankrupt. The marriage, which did not have children, would last thirteen years, until the death of Saint-Exupéry, despite the bohemian life and his multiple lovers.
In her memoirs, Consuelo stated that her husband was a selfish, childish, cruel and unfaithful man. But, although sometimes they distanced themselves, and their relationship was stormy when they were together, there is a theory that the famous rose that the protagonist of 'The Little Prince' cares for on his planet represents Consuelo. A rose with which he has disagreements, which is flirtatious and vain, and on top of that he coughs.
. . Just like Consuelo, who was asthmatic.
The little prince decides to get away from her and fly to other places, but when the Little Prince arrives on Earth and sees a field of roses, the supposed symbol of Saint-Exupéry's lovers, the character despises them, stating that his rose is special, because she is the one he really loves, the one he has been taking care of, because she is his rose. In the book, the Little Prince regrets abandoning his rose and states: “I didn't understand anything then! I should have judged her by her actions and not by her words.
The flower perfumed and illuminated my life and I should never have run away from there! I didn't know how to guess the tenderness that hid her poor tricks! The flowers are so contradictory!
But I was too young to know how to love her. " Beginning in 1932, Saint-Exupéry devoted himself entirely to writing and journalism. As a reporter for the 'Paris-Soir' newspaper, he traveled to Vietnam and Moscow, and also to Spain, in 1936, to cover the Civil War, where he witnessed horrors that influenced his reflections on the human condition.
A year earlier, in 1935, he crashed in the Libyan desert while trying to break the record of flying from Paris to Saigon in less than 3 days and 15 hours. He was flying accompanied by his mechanic, André Prévot. Saint-Exupéry descended to try to get his bearings and crashed into a rocky plateau.
Although both were unharmed, they wandered for three days in the desert, without food or water, until they were miraculously rescued. That harsh experience led him to write the novel 'Land of Men', published in 1939 and which was awarded the prize of the French Academy. A few years after that accident, in 1938, Saint-Exupéry crashed again, this time in Guatemala, and due to a simple misunderstanding: the Frenchman had indicated the amount of fuel with which they should fill the plane's tanks in liters and he had given it to him.
they had been served in gallons, so it carried more than four times the desired weight, an overload that proved fatal. When World War II began, he joined the ranks as a captain in the Air Force. He was first a flight instructor in the 101 Air Battalion, but was soon transferred to a reconnaissance squadron.
On May 23, while German tanks were overrunning the city of Arras, his plane, a Bloch 174, was riddled with enemy anti-aircraft fire . Despite this, he managed to return to his base with the crew unharmed, and received the Croix de Guerre as a prize. That action would inspire his book 'War Pilot', published in 1942.
A few months after the French surrender, Saint-Exupéry went to New York, where he settled at the end of 1940, helped by his literary agents. There, he was part of various efforts to persuade Americans to enter the war, something that did not happen until the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor a year later . In the spring of 1943, Saint-Exupéry went to the New York apartment where one of his mistresses, the journalist Sylvia Hamilton, who did not speak French, was staying and handed her a paper bag.
Inside, was the manuscript of 'The Little Prince'. The writer had decided to go to Algiers to join the Allied forces and told Hamilton: "I wish I had something wonderful to give you, but this is all I have. " A few days later the first edition, in English and French, went on sale in the United States (although it was not published in France until 1946, two years after his death).
Saint-Exupéry took with him a copy in French, which he always carried with him and used to frequently show it to his fellow soldiers. He only lent it if it was returned to him within 24 hours and with comments. When, in the autumn, his publishers gave him the first sales data, he saw that they were lower figures than his works used to reach: “alone”, in quotes, they had placed 30,000 copies in English and 7,000 in French.
Saint-Exupéry wanted to participate in the war as a pilot, and, with the rank of commander, he was assigned to a squadron of P-38 Lightning fighters. He participated in a couple of reconnaissance missions, but in the second he destroyed his plane due to an engine failure and, together with the pain he suffered from his multiple old fractures and added to the fact that he was older than the most other pilots, grounded him for many months. Finally, the American command reinstated him to flight missions and on July 31, 1944, at 8:25 in the morning, he took off from an air base in Corsica piloting an unarmed P-38 .
With a flight autonomy of 6 hours, its mission was to collect information on the movements of German troops in the Rhone Valley in order to prepare for Operation Drgoon, the Allied landing in the south of France. never heard from him again. He was 44 years old.
The mystery of what happened to him has endured since 1944, with various theories successively gaining strength and losing it. Was it shot down by a German pilot? Did you have a mechanical breakdown?
Did he crash because of his poor physical condition? In the opinion of aviation historian Bernard Mark, it may even have been due to suicide; but many think that taking one's own life did not fit with the writer's philosophy of life. In 1998, a Marseille fisherman named Jean-Claude Bianco found in his nets a silver identification bracelet on which Antoine de Saint-Exupéry 's name was engraved , as well as that of Consuelo, his wife, and the address of his publishers.
from New York. Two years later, in the year 2000, another Marseille, the professional diver Luc Vanrell, found the remains of Saint-Exupéry's plane scattered on the seabed, east of the island of Riou . After years of negotiations with the French government to obtain authorization, the Aéro-ReLIC association brought the remains to the surface, which were officially identified in September 2003 as those of the Saint-Exupéry plane.
No bullet holes were found in them, but since they only made up a small part of the plane, it cannot be said that it was not shot down. Over the decades, a couple of testimonies have come to light from German pilots who claimed to have shot down a P-38 in the area, but one of them was dismissed as false and there is no evidence to corroborate or disprove the other. .
In the 1990s, the old testimony of a woman who lived in the town of Carqueiranne, named Simone Boudet, was known, and that on the day of Saint-Exupéry's last flight she would have seen the P-38 crash. A few days later, the sea washed up the body of a soldier, who was buried anonymously in the local cemetery. So far, Saint-Exupéry's relatives have refused to allow the body to be exhumed for a DNA test, and it is also not certain that a viable sample could be obtained from his presumed remains to carry out the test due to the state of conservation.
of these after spending several days at sea and having been buried for almost 80 years. The mystery, therefore, continues to surround the end of his life, but the legacy of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, his immortal works, are still as alive today as they were 80 years ago. And you?
What do you think of the story of Saint-Exupéry? What about 'The Little Prince'? Have you read it?
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