Le Figaro: "Dossier on Antoine de Saint-Exupéry".

The unpublished correspondence of Antoine and Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry

"RÉCIT : Neither with you, nor without you. The married life of Antoine and Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry was tumultuous. The publication of their correspondence reveals just how attached the writer was to his wife, who inspired the character of the rose in "Le Petit Prince".

Last photograph of the Saint-Exupery couple in New York, April 1, 1943. Test

The long-awaited publication of this famous correspondence has finally been unearthed. Fourteen years of intimate exchanges, to get to the heart of the couple formed by Saint-Exupéry and Consuelo, between 1930 and 1944, the year of the author's disappearance in mid-air.

They met in Buenos Aires in the late summer of 1930. Saint-Exupéry, then in charge of Aeroposta Argentina, had opened several routes to Rio, Montevideo and Porto Alegre. He published his first novel, Courrier Sud, with the prescient line: "Every woman contains a secret: an accent, a gesture, a silence". A year her junior, Consuelo, née Suncin, is an attractive widow from El Salvador, a small Central American country famous for its volcanoes. She has lived in California, Mexico and Paris, where she frequented the literary avant-garde, and has a passion for painting. Henri Jeanson, a keen observer, described her as "a seductive little animal whose flight of fancy was as good as its plumage.Very amusing, very intelligent, very lively, very chirpy".

Love at first sight from the very first meeting. Saint-Exupéry wrote to him right away: "Once upon a time, there was a child who had discovered a treasure.But this treasure was too beautiful for a child whose eyes did not know how to understand it or whose arms could not contain it". This first letter opens this fascinating cross-correspondence, containing some 160 missives, accompanied by never-before-seen illustrations. In her memoir Memoirs of the Rose, published after his death, Consuelo wrote: "He, the Flying Knight, offered me everything: his heart, his name, his life.He told me that his life was a theft, that he wanted to take me away" [...].

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The aviator and the mountaineer, a formidable story of friendship

They were eighteen when they met for the first time, at the Lycée Saint-Louis on Boulevard Saint-Michel in the Latin Quarter. Antoine de Saint-Éxupéry and Henry de Ségogne. The aviator and the mountaineer. The man of "heterogeneous accoutrement" and the dandy... In a story that's both bloody well-informed - with previously unpublished letters and documents - and full of empathy and delightful anecdotes, Bernard Bonnelle tells an exceptional story of friendship. As in the best of fairy tales, everything pits the two protagonists against each other. In fact, the book is subtitled "l'amitié malgré tout" ("friendship in spite of everything").

It's true, one wonders how these two boys ever bonded. Born by chance, their friendship had flourished without reason, like weeds, and their countless squabbles throughout their twenty years of companionship only strengthened it. This friendship only ended with Saint-Ex's death, at the age of 44, after a flying expedition that ended abruptly on the coast of Marseille - it was July 31, 1944. On the mission sheet, it was written in English: "Pilot did not return. Presumed lost.No pictures". [...]

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By Françoise Dargent, Thierry Clermont and Mohammed Aïssaoui

Published April 28, 2021