CHAPTER 1
Le Bourget Aerodrome (Paris), 1922
ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY
HE PULLS THE JOYSTICK BACK toward his chest and the biplane lifts in search of a bank of clouds over Paris. The Caudron C.59 shudders, the Hispano-Suiza motor snorts. He soars through the white clouds, then pulls on the metal cable and forces the plane to climb an air mountain until it’s doing a handstand in the sky. The vibration of the fuselage carries through to his hands and from there, to his entire body.
Sublieutenant Saint-Exupéry shivers, intoxicated with vertigo, and smiles with the infinite satisfaction of the mad, of children absorbed in their games: no notion of risk or time, immersed in a world that belongs solely to them, because they have made it to their own measure.
While on the ground, the Caudron C.59 plane is nothing more than a cumbersome 700-kilo lump of wood, full of screws, rivets, and solder. It looks pathetically fragile as it rolls along on its little bicycle wheels, dragging its heavy frame—an overgrown child, chest puffed out, rattling precariously on its wire feet as it starts to trundle down the runway. The smallest stone in its path could knock it off balance, causing it to overturn spectacularly. But then the miracle happens: The heavy rolling hulk takes off from the ground, lifts itself toward the horizon, ascends and then suddenly banks slightly, agilely, gracefully even. It’s made a mockery of its destiny as a whale stranded in its hangar.
Antoine matches the plane itself. On the ground, both his big body, which forces him to move awkwardly, even clumsily, and his head filled with daydreams, totally ill-equipped to handle the most mundane aspects of daily living, convert him into a confused, tottering penguin futilely flapping its wings and unable to reach the sea. But up in the sky, he’s a totally different person.
He becomes weightless.
He moves the rudder to the left and the nose of the plane abruptly rolls in that direction. He smiles. He’s fulfilled every child’s dream: to make toys real and reality a game.
He traces a braid in the air. He loves feeling that giddy tingle which elevates him beyond mediocrity; realising that he’s left all the vulgarity of the barracks on the ground, together with those officers who yell until the veins stick out in their necks.
Antoine only raises his voice on those happy nights when he’s had too much burgundy or pastis and he launches into songs which start out cheerful and end up melancholy. When he gets angry, he falls silent.
How sterile it is to say
What silence already knows …
The plane sways in the air and Antoine sways too. He is a great admirer of the poet Mallarmé, and to show his support, he himself occasionally writes verse.
He has already performed a thousand pirouettes in the air, but that’s not enough. It’s never enough. For him, life always feels like a suit that’s too tight. He adjusts the throttle and the machine loses momentum until it comes to a standstill. A plane hanging motionless in the sky becomes a lump of metal definitively attracted by a violent gravitational force. The plane stalls and goes into a spin. A small group of spectators on the ground follows the spine-tingling nosedive with an accompanying “Ohhh!” which wants to be cheerful but sounds nervous. An eternal few seconds later, Antoine abruptly pulls on the joystick and levels the plane into a glide which shaves a field of poppies.
He’s taken advantage of the absence of most of the officers of the 34th Regiment this Sunday afternoon to mount his own little air show. His favourite childhood game at his family’s Saint-Maurice-de-Rémens mansion, full of nooks and crannies, was, in fact, devising plays he staged for his siblings. He was both the playwright who wrote the scripts and the over-the-top actor who performed them. His family could never tell whether he was a serious child or a clown. They were incapable of confirming which was the real Antoine: the one who would stand mesmerised in front of the window on rainy afternoons watching the drops racing across the glass, or the one who turned the attic upside down and then suddenly appeared disguised as a buccaneer or an explorer shouting ridiculous phrases in order to amuse his sisters and cousins.
He asks himself that very question. Who am I? The court jester who shakes his bells when he’s with others, or the silent introvert I am when I’m on my own?
A vibration in a wing pulls him out of his daydream. He shouldn’t become distracted when he’s flying, but his thoughts soar when he’s in the air. He turns his head for a few seconds in a reckless attempt to catch a glimpse of his friends who are watching his aerobatics, but they are mere pins stuck into the ground.
There they are—Charles Sallès, Bertrand de Saussine, and Olivier de Vilmorin … But when he performs his most outlandish spins, he’s performing for only one person, the girl who never leaves his thoughts.
He recalls the first time his cousin took him to visit the lavish house on Rue de la Chaise where Madame de Vilmorin was already then hosting one of the most intellectual salons in Paris.
A waxen-faced butler had shown them to a room with quilted sofas and walnut bookshelves to wait for the two Vilmorin brothers to finish getting ready to accompany them to an ice cream parlour on the Champs-Élysées. And then he’d heard the music. It was a violin being played with a mournful slowness, the bow moving ever so slowly across the strings without the note ever disappearing entirely. The notes had been so frayed that they hung in the air as if snagged and, rather than a melody, they had seemed more like its echo.
The music had pulled him upstairs and he’d reached the third floor in a trance. The second door off the hallway had been ajar, so he had poked his head in.
A young girl in purple pyjamas had been playing, reclining against cushions of various colours on top of a bed covered with a blue satin quilt. Her chin had rested so softly on the chinrest that the violin had almost become a pillow. A governess with a white cap had been sitting on a chair by her side and had fixed her gaze on the intruder. But instead of throwing him out, she had gestured for him to wait and put a finger to her lips to tell him to be quiet.
Hypnotised, he had contemplated the girl’s red hair, her green eyes, her pale hands. She had been playing with a mixture of indifference and concentration, which had forced her to focus on the far end of the fingerboard, where her own fingers were playing at jumping rope.
He remembers fervently begging the god of all things beautiful never to let that melody end as long as he lived.
When it had finished, the governess, Madame Petermann, had begun to clap with scant enthusiasm, and had arched her brow as a sign that he should do the same. And he had, of course, loudly and enthusiastically. After carefully laying her violin inside the case on top of the quilt, the girl had given him a smile. That smile could stop time. At least it had stopped his, and all the chronometers in his life had been reset to zero.
“I don’t think we’ve been introduced…,” she had said, and Antoine had blushed as if the girl’s red hair had been reflected in his face, and he’d started stuttering.
“I beg you to forgive me bursting in, mademoiselle. It was the music that made me lose my discretion…”
“And you are…?”
“Oh, of course, forgive my lack of manners! I’m Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. You must be Olivier’s sister. I’m a friend of his; we study together at the Académie Bossuet.”
“I’m Louise de Vilmorin.”
“My apologies for appearing in your room uninvited. I’ll leave now.”
“Oh, don’t fuss. A hateful condition of my hip bones forces me to keep to my bed, and my bedroom serves as the salon where I receive my visitors. I adore visits!”
“Could I come and see you one day?”
“You can ask for an appointment,” she had replied without enthusiasm. But at the sight of the young man’s look of desolation, she’d added coquettishly: “Or you can just sneak in during my music practise.”
A voice had called him from the depths of the house: “Saint-Ex! Where the devil are you?”
“Your brother wants me; I have to leave. I’ll be back!”
He’d barely said it when his enthusiasm was replaced by concern. “But will you remember me when you see me again? My face is so ordinary!”
She had looked at him with an inscrutable smile which could have meant either complacency or disdain.
“Who knows. I’m forgetful.”
“It doesn’t matter!” he’d replied quickly. “I’ll definitely remember you, Mademoiselle de Vilmorin. I’ll remember for both of us!”
In the cockpit, he laughs now at his own awkwardness. He presses down on the throttle pedal, opens the flow of fuel, and moves the joystick so the plane will perform a zigzag in the sky. Shortly after he had met her, he had to report for his obligatory military service and enlisted in the air force to make his long-held dream of flying a reality. After several transfers, he was posted to Casablanca, and during that period of training and discomfort, he was accompanied by the memory of Louise, a love that kept growing at a distance.
His return to Paris and a posting to the 34th Regiment quartered at Le Bourget filled him with delight at being back in a city full of theatres, bookstores, boulevards, and get-togethers with his friends … but in particular at the opportunity of revisiting the house on Rue de la Chaise. He needed to see her again.
He asked André de Vilmorin over and over again to be received by Louise, but André was tired of seeing all his friends stammering pathetically when confronted by his sister, even being prepared to line up in the small visitors’ room in the naïve hope of begging a few moments of attention from a girl who allowed herself to be idolised without losing that gesture of disdain with which she dismissed her suitors as soon as she tired of their presence.
One Thursday morning when he thought it would never happen, a private entered the office, where Antoine was scribbling lines of poetry in his spare time, and gave him a note which informed him that Mademoiselle de Vilmorin would receive him.
The next day, he barely ate, moving the noodles around on his plate, leaving them virtually untouched. He got dressed with the utmost care: He put on the only suit he owned, which he’d managed to get the barracks laundry to iron for him in exchange for a half pack of cigarettes, and carefully arranged his hair, combing it up high with brilliantine. He left early for the Vilmorin residence because he needed flowers, lots of flowers, the most beautiful flowers in France. He would have loved to be the Merovingian King Childebert, who built an entire rose garden for his queen in the centre of Paris. Louise de Vilmorin deserved nothing less.
He walked to a very high-class flower shop in Rue Charron, which had a display in its front window as enticing as a candy store, and asked for an enormous bouquet of colourful flowers. When the sales assistant told him the price, he went pale. That month his mother had made the payment on the coat he’d been buying on installments since the previous winter, and he’d barely managed to eke out his military pay to the end of the month, leaving him with just a few coins. He couldn’t hide his embarrassment from the sales assistant as he told her he’d thought better of it. Back out on the street he sighed, defeated. He’d been the happiest man in the world for twenty-four hours and now he was back to being the most wretched.
As he reached the corner, it occurred to him that he wasn’t far from the flower market on Île de la Cité. It was a grand hothouse with a mossy smell and the feel of a train station in among the bustle of barrows from the food market and soldiers on leave buying flowers for apprentice seamstresses on the Right Bank of the Seine.
He emerged with a small bunch of lilacs and happy again.
The butler, dressed in a vest with golden fringes, opened the front door with professional indifference and pointed to the small reception room with a gloved hand. An unpleasant surprise was waiting for Antoine: two other young men were already sitting there. There was clearly a queue to court Louise de Vilmorin!
His rivals were impeccably dressed in pinstriped suits. One was carrying a gilded vase full of exotic flowers and the other was weighed down by an enormous box of cakes and assortments bearing the logo of Dalloyau, an exquisite pâtisserie on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré with the finest cream pastries in Paris.
He hid his little bouquet behind his back before they noticed it. He now realised that his posy was too common, inappropriate for a refined young lady like Louise de Vilmorin. He greeted the two men with a nod and propped himself against the doorframe with the unpleasant feeling that he was a vagrant in this elegant house and that at any moment they would realise he was an imposter and the butler would throw him out on the street.
It’s true that his family belonged to the old aristocracy of Lyons and that he had spent his childhood in a small castle with a thousand doors. But that was too many doors for the paltry heating. As a ruined count, he felt ridiculous using his title. He loathed his cheap flowers and angrily squeezed their defenceless stems.
The butler announced that Mademoiselle de Vilmorin was awaiting them in her bedroom, and the three of them headed upstairs on their pilgrimage. Antoine let the others go ahead and, when no one was looking, crushed the flowers into the pocket of his jacket and made a half turn to leave while he still had time to avoid making a fool of himself. But as he was turning around, he saw that the sphinx-faced butler was following them, so he continued up the stairs.
Louise was sitting on her bed with her back against the headboard and two enormous cushions supporting her arms. Her beauty was in her weightlessness; there was something that made her float above everything.
With a triumphant smile, one of the boys approached to hand her the weighty vase overflowing with ribbons, bows, and flowers. Instead of stretching out her arms to receive it, she extended a politely indifferent “thank you” and turned to Madame Petermann, who stepped forward to accept it with an annoyed expression on her face and deposited it on the bedside table next to two similar floral arrangements. The other gentleman stepped up to give her his sweet delicacies; she gave him the same brief smile and thanked him. Without the slightest sign of taking the box with the huge purple bow, she looked at the governess, who accepted the package. Louise propped herself up on one elbow to see the third visitor, who seemed to be concealing himself behind the other two.
“Are you playing hide-and-seek?”
Antoine blushed and took a few steps forward.
“Ah, it’s you! The Count Saint … Saint what?”
“Saint-Exupéry! How nice that you remembered me after all this time!”
She looked at his empty hands, and in order to hide them, Antoine stuck them into the pockets of his jacket. His words came out flustered.
“Forgive me, I wanted to bring you a gift…”
As he began to gesticulate, his nervousness made him pull his hands from his pockets, and with the movement of his gigantic paws, a shower of lilac petals flew out. They scattered throughout the room, forming a cloud which hung briefly in the air before landing softly on the quilt.
Louise’s bored expression changed for the first time.
“Are you a magician?” she asked.
“M-my apologies…,” Antoine stammered.
“Don’t apologise,” she replied with a glimmer in her eyes that made them seem even greener. “I love magicians.”
“A corporal in my squadron in Casablanca taught me a few card tricks.”
“Put on a show for us!”
“I, err … I don’t have a deck of cards.”
“Madame Petermann, could you go and find us a deck?”
“Mademoiselle, you know I have orders from Madame de Vilmorin not to leave you alone with gentlemen.”
Louise, used to being in charge, turned to the other two young men, who were observing the conversation as if turned to stone.
“Why don’t you two go in search of Monsieur Dupont, the butler, and ask him to bring up some cards from the bridge room?”
Reduced to the role of secretaries, the two dejected young men left the room, and returned followed by the butler carrying a deck of cards on a silver tray.
Antoine performed his tricks. He guessed the card she deposited in the middle of the deck, and repeated the trick with one of the gentlemen, who collaborated reluctantly. Not long afterward, the two gentlemen left, defeated.
“Do you know any other magic?” asked Louise, tired of card tricks.
“I know the works of Mallarmé … He performs magic with words!”
“Tell me something … what do you think of Baudelaire?”
“He’s capable of the most sublime and the most grotesque.”
“Come back tomorrow and explain that to me better. I love poetry.”
Her smile was full of promise and their love affair began from there.
If only Lou-Lou, as he now calls her, could be here this Sunday afternoon to see his aerial feats, but her painful hip still hasn’t recovered and she has to rest a little longer. He performs his aerobatics to continue surprising her with tales of his exploits. She can’t abide boredom! With cheerful impulsiveness, he becomes a trapeze artist in the sky over Paris.
As soon as he lands, he gets rid of his goggles and the military flight suit he put on over his shirt and Sunday trousers. He hurriedly fixes his tie as he walks along the edge of the runway toward the waiting group. Sallès strides to meet him, arms open wide.
“Saint-Ex, you were magnificent!” And he grabs him by the arm with camaraderie. “I salute a crack aviator!”
Bertrand de Saussine claps and whistles and Antoine reciprocates with an exaggerated bow. Olivier de Vilmorin, however, impeccable in his tweed jacket and silk tie, keeps his arms crossed, the expression on his face severe.
Antoine looks at his friend and future brother-in-law.
“Those manoeuvres of yours…”
“That last turn was an L … An L for Lou-Lou! I did it in her honour. Will you tell your sister? You should tell her; she won’t believe me!”
“You shouldn’t be doing that.”
His bitter tone surprises Antoine.
“I shouldn’t trace her letter?”
“You shouldn’t perform such idiocies. Don’t you understand? You’re going to kill yourself one of these days!”
Antoine takes him arm affectionately, but Olivier, irritated, shakes himself loose.
“It’s nothing more than a game for you! You’re an egoist. Those ‘great aviator’ pirouettes … What about my sister? What future awaits her? To be a pilot’s widow before she’s thirty?”
Bertrand tries to defuse the situation.
“Come on, Olivier! Saint-Ex knows what he’s up to, right?”
Charles Sallès gestures ambiguously. He once flew as a passenger with Antoine, who let go of the joystick and pretended he was playing the maracas.
Antoine has fallen silent. It happens to him sometimes: Suddenly, the lights go out.
Olivier de Vilmorin softens his tone and addresses the others: “My mother’s worried. Do you know what my older siblings call Saint-Ex?”
“No.”
“The condemned man.”
The Vilmorin family are like a fortress. Descended from Joan of Arc, they are aristocrats and millionaires. And who is this Antoine de Saint-Exupéry? It’s true that he has an ostentatious surname and even the title of count, which he is embarrassed to use. But he is an aristocrat from the provinces, his father is dead, he’s known to have only one winter suit and one summer one, with shiny patches on the elbows. He’s doing his obligatory military service with the air force, and says he wants to dedicate himself to a profession which is as seemingly useless as it is pointlessly dangerous—an aviator. Olivier knows that his mother is uneasy about this fiancé that her daughter has found herself, when she could have future government lawyers, sons of ministers, and heirs to the greatest fortunes of France falling head over heels for her, all of whom have made a futile pilgrimage to the house on Rue de la Chaise since she was of courting age. But she has chosen this ungainly young man with nothing to offer. Lou-Lou and her damned whims!
Charles Sallès intervenes to ease the silence.
“If Saint-Ex is a condemned man, he has the right to a last meal! Let’s celebrate it at the Café des Deux Magots!”
Antoine emerges from his lethargy.
“Yes! My treat!” he says happily.
As soon as he’s said it, he realises that he has just a few miserly francs in his wallet to get through the rest of the month, but that’s not important right then. He can get to the end of the month by eating all his meals at the barracks mess, and if he’s in dire need, he can always ask his mother, a nurse in Lyons, for some money and reimburse her when he gets his next pay packet.
Montmartre is the painters’ and sculptors’ quarter, but the writers’ stomping ground lies between the Latin Quarter and Saint-Germain-des-Prés. That’s why Sallès, to paper over that somber moment, has proposed the café in the heart of Saint-Germain, a spot which has an irresistible attraction for Antoine and for Louise herself, who also writes poetry.
As they take the Pont Neuf across the Seine in Saussine’s Citroën, Antoine repeats what he tells them every time they go there: Mallarmé, Oscar Wilde, Apollinaire … they were all regular customers.
“But Verlaine more than anyone … he was the Socrates of the Deux Magots!”
Although they’ve all heard the story many times, they listen to him with pleasure. They know that as long as Antoine is talking, everything’s fine. He’s especially good at storytelling, a power of seduction that turns his flying anecdotes into fascinating tales.
The four young men wave at the waiter, dressed in an apron down his ankles, and settle in at a table under one of the two figurines of the Chinese wise men for which the establishment is named. Fifty years earlier, when the former proprietor decided to convert his fabric and novelty store into a restaurant, he kept the decorative statues of two Chinese men in meditative poses. Nobody remembers any more how they came to be there, nor what they represent. Antoine loves to invent biographies for them.
“I maintain they were Marco Polo’s commercial go-betweens in China when he used to travel in search of silk and fabrics. What do you say?”
“But if they were mere fabric dealers, why would they call them wise men?”
“My guess is we’re dealing with two Si-Fan masters,” ventured Sallès.
“Si-Fan? What the hell is that?”
“What? You haven’t read the Fu-Manchu novels? Well, the Si-Fan secret society is silently infiltrating everywhere. Its members are assassins who move like shadows and are trained to kill without a sound.”
“You’re wasting your time, Charles. You ought to read more serious things,” Bertrand reproaches him.
“That’s nonsense!” Antoine can’t help blurting out with excessive vehemence as he gets up from his chair and pounds the table. “How can you ask literature to be serious? If literature is serious, it becomes nothing more than a notarised document!”
He says this so forcefully that an embarrassed silence falls over the room. Customers at other tables stare at him and Antoine is mortified. Olivier changes the subject, but Antoine has become taciturn and tells them he’s going outside for some fresh air.
In fact, it’s not fresh air he’s after, but solitude. On the terrace, all the tables are empty—that languid, late-Sunday-afternoon abandonment when night falls without warning. He turns up the collar of his jacket and lights a cigarette, trying to warm himself with the embers. Traffic on the boulevard has died down, barely any pedestrians remain, and a cold wind lifts the edges of their jackets.
An elderly man dressed in an old three-quarter-length drill coat is leaning on a long, thin stick that looks to Antoine like a Zulu lance. The man turns to him.
“Don’t you think it’s extraordinary?”
Antoine looks in front of him and all he can see is an empty sidewalk, a few cars, and a cyclist riding past in profile.
“What’s extraordinary?”
“The streetlamp!”
And then it dawns on him: the cap, the drill coat, and that stick which, in reality, is a pole that in times gone by must have had a wick on its tip.
“Are you a lamplighter?”
“Yes, sir, I am.”
“But we haven’t had gas lights in Paris for years.”
The man makes a wry face.
“And don’t I regret it. You know something? When I was working, my job often tired me out, and I could only think about getting home and going to bed. The lamplighter was the last one to go to bed after lighting all the lamps at night and the first to get up at the break of day to put them out.”
“Lighting and putting out…”
“That’s it.”
“And it wasn’t a boring job?”
The man looks at him, genuinely perplexed.
“Boring? What a strange idea!”
“What I mean is, didn’t it become repetitive?”
“Repetitive, sure, of course. That’s how it had to be. First one lamp, then another, and another after that. First one street, and then another, and another, and another. And so on…”
“And you didn’t find that tedious?”
“Tedious? What do you mean? It was my work, I had a mission: Light the light and put it out. If I hadn’t lit them every night, someone could have fallen into a pothole and broken his legs, or worse. An honest couple might have been assaulted without anyone realising it. I was responsible for the light. First one lamp and then another and another. And so on. And at dawn, the reverse: put one out and then another and then another after that…”
“But now that you’re retired and the streetlights are electric, you must be happy; now you can sleep as much as you want.”
“No. I now realise how happy I was when I was going round the whole city. First one lamp and then another, and another one after that … and so on.”
“So what are doing here at this hour?”
“I continue to go round the city making sure all the lights are working. If there’s a burnt-out bulb or a vandal has broken one, I jot it down in a notebook and the next morning I tell them at city hall so they’ll fix it.”
“And do they pay any attention to you?”
The man looks sad.
“Hardly ever.”
Antoine feels the urge to get up and embrace him, but he holds back because at school they taught him the norms of social behavior, one of which was not to hug strangers in the street at night. He can’t recall if, in that book of good manners, an exception was made for lamplighters. He just can’t understand a planet on which no one finds two strangers fighting in the street odd, but many are scandalised if they see two strangers embracing.
“I’m going to go on with my rounds.”
“Sir?”
“Yes?”
“With your permission, I’d like to be your friend.”
Text copyright © 2017 by Antonio Iturbe
Translation copyright © 2021 by Lilit Žekulin Thwaites
