He Flew the Mail Through
Mountains. Then He Drew a Prince.

You are twenty-six, from an old but impoverished aristocratic family, and you have failed at several careers — the Naval Academy entrance exam, business school, various desk jobs. What you have not failed at is flying. You obtained your pilot's license during military service, and you have pursued aviation with the single-minded attachment of someone who has finally found what fits. The Latécoère company — later Aéropostale — is hiring pilots for its mail routes between Europe, Africa, and South America. The routes cross the Sahara, the Atlas mountains, the Andes. They are genuinely dangerous. Pilots die.

You will spend the next decade flying these routes, managing airfield outposts in the Sahara, navigating mountains in darkness and fog, landing in places with no radio and no runway, rescuing crashed colleagues from the desert, and being rescued in turn. This life will produce three books — Southern Mail, Night Flight, Wind, Sand and Stars — that will make you France's most celebrated writer before you are forty. But first you have to survive the routes.

You are now chief of the Aeroposta Argentina route network, based in Buenos Aires. Night Flight (Vol de nuit) has just won the Prix Femina and made you one of the most celebrated novelists in France. André Gide writes the preface. The novel is based on your experiences managing the night mail routes over the Andes: a pilot named Fabien disappears in a storm while the operations director Rivière, on the ground, makes the decisions that extend the flight and therefore cause the death. Rivière is not a villain; he is a man who believes that the mail must go through because something larger than individual safety depends on it. Whether he is right is the novel's question.

You have also recently married Consuelo Suncín, a Salvadoran widow of remarkable temperament. The marriage will be one of the great turbulent relationships of literary history — passionate, unfaithful on both sides, permanently unresolved. She will be, in one reading, the rose in The Little Prince: beautiful, demanding, impossible to live with, impossible to leave.

December 29, 1935. You are attempting to break the speed record for the Paris-to-Saigon route, flying for a prize of 150,000 francs that would solve your persistent financial problems. Your navigator is André Prévot. At 2 AM, somewhere over Libya, you lose altitude, misjudge the terrain, and crash. The aircraft is wrecked. You are in the Libyan desert, far off the mail routes, in conditions of extreme dehydration and sun. You have no water. You have no radio contact. No one knows where you are.

You walk. And walk. For four days you walk, your mouth so dry that you can barely swallow, seeing mirages, hallucinating. On the fourth day, a Bedouin caravan finds you. They give you camel milk. You have survived. The experience — dying of thirst in a desert, the mirages, the moment of rescue that seems impossible — will become the central image in Wind, Sand and Stars, and one of the seeds, later, of the pilot who lands in the desert and meets a small prince from an asteroid.

Wind, Sand and Stars (Terre des hommes) is published in 1939 and wins the Grand Prix du Roman of the Académie française and, in the United States, the National Book Award. It is your finest work to date — part memoir, part philosophy, the crash stories interwoven with meditations on human meaning and solidarity. You are now the most celebrated French writer alive. Then France falls.

June 1940: France signs an armistice with Germany. The defeat is catastrophic and humiliating. You are in the air force — you fly reconnaissance missions during the fall of France, missions you know are strategically useless but which you fly anyway, because refusing seems worse than futility. In December 1940 you travel to the United States, where your books are enormously popular, to argue for American intervention. You will spend the next three years in New York, growing increasingly depressed, watching France occupied, unable to go home.

New York. A borrowed house in Northport, Long Island. It is autumn. You are sitting at your desk in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, and you begin drawing. You have always drawn, always sketched little figures in the margins of letters and manuscripts. The figure you keep drawing is a small boy with golden hair, standing on a tiny planet. You don't know exactly what he is yet. You write around him, into him, through him. A pilot crashes in the Sahara. The small prince arrives from Asteroid B-612. There is a rose who is beautiful and demanding and whom the prince loves but cannot live with. There are grown-ups who understand numbers but not things.

The Little Prince will be published simultaneously in French and English in April 1943 by Reynal and Hitchcock. Saint-Exupéry will not live to see it succeed. He will be dead within two years. The prince returns to his rose by allowing a snake to bite him. "And now here is my secret," says the fox, "a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."

You have finally gotten what you wanted: you have returned to active military service, flying reconnaissance missions over occupied France and North Africa from USAAF bases in Tunisia and then Sardinia. The American authorities are reluctant: at forty-three, you are officially too old for the P-38 Lightning reconnaissance aircraft you will be flying, and you have a partially paralyzed shoulder from a previous crash that makes it difficult to reach the canopy controls. You have lobbied for months. You have used every connection available. You have promised that you will retire after five missions.

You do not retire after five missions. You fly more. The missions are unarmed reconnaissance — you go over enemy territory, photograph what you can, and come home without being able to fight back if intercepted. You love the work. You write to friends about the clean simplicity of having something to do. You are finally, after three years of useless safety, in a position where your actions matter and the stakes are real.

July 31, 1944. Morning. You take off from Borgo airfield in Corsica at 8:45 AM in a Lockheed P-38 Lightning (French designation F-5B). Your mission is photographic reconnaissance over the Rhône valley and the Grenoble-Annecy region — part of the preparation for the Allied landings in southern France that will occur on August 15. The weather is clear. You are expected back by early afternoon.

You do not return. No radio contact is made. No emergency is reported. You simply disappear over the Mediterranean. There are no witnesses. For decades, theories accumulate: shot down by German fighters, mechanical failure, pilot error (you were known to daydream in the cockpit), even voluntary disappearance. In 1998, a fisherman finds a silver identity bracelet engraved with your name in the sea near Marseille. In 2000, wreckage of a P-38 is found on the seabed. In 2008, a German pilot named Horst Rippert claims he shot you down, not knowing who you were, and that he regrets it. The Mediterranean keeps its version of the story. You are forty-four years old.

In September 2000, divers working off the coast near Marseille locate wreckage on the seabed at a depth of seventy meters: a Lockheed P-38 Lightning aircraft. The registration number is confirmed as that of Saint-Exupéry's aircraft. He has been missing for fifty-six years. The Little Prince has been translated into 300 languages, has sold over 200 million copies, and is one of the best-selling books in the history of publishing. It has never been out of print.

The prince, on the last page of the book, tells the pilot that it will look as though he has died, but this is not how it will be. "In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing when you look at the sky at night. You — only you — will have stars that can laugh." The pilot, left alone in the desert with the broken aircraft, says: "And no grown-up will ever understand that this is a matter of so much importance!"