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Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Biography

born: June 29, 1900
died: July 31, 1944

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was a French writer and aviator.

Count Antoine Marie Roger de Saint-Exupéry was born in Lyon into an old family of provincial nobility, the third of five children of Count Jean de Saint-Exupéry, an insurance broker who died when Antoine was three, and his wife, Marie de Foscolombe.

After failing his final exams at a preparatory school, he entered the École des Beaux-Arts to study architecture. In 1921, he began his military service in the 2nd Regiment of Chasseurs, and was sent to Strasbourg for training as a pilot. The next year, he obtained his license and was offered a transfer to the air force. But his fiancée's family objected, so he settled in Paris and took an office job. His engagement was ultimately broken off, however, and he worked at several jobs over the next few years without success. He later became engaged to the future novelist Louise Leveque de Vilmorin.

By 1926, he was flying again. He became one of the pioneers of international postal flight in the days when aircraft had few instruments and pilots flew by instinct. Later he complained that those who flew the more advanced aircraft were more like accountants than pilots. He worked on the Aéropostale between Toulouse and Dakar. His first tale L'Aviateur (The Aviator) was published in the magazine Le Navire d'argent. In 1928, he published his first book, Courrier-Sud (Southern Mail), and flew the Casablanca/Dakar route. He became the director of Cap Juby airfield in Rio de Oro, Sahara. 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), which won the Prix Femina, was published.

In 1931, at Grasse, Saint-Exupéry married Consuelo Suncin Sandoval Zeceña of Gómez, a twice-widowed writer and Salvadorian artist. Theirs was a stormy union as Saint-Exupéry traveled frequently and indulged in numerous affairs.

Saint-Exupéry kept writing and flying until the beginning of World War II. During the war, he initially flew in the French GC II/33 reconnaissance squadron. He then escaped to New York City, and lived in Québec City for a time in 1942. After his time in North America, Saint-Exupéry returned to Europe to fight with the Allies in a squadron based in the Mediterranean. Then aged 44, he was about to quit but agreed to one last mission: to collect data on German troop movements in the Rhone River Valley. He took off the night of July 31, 1944, and was never seen again. A lady reported having seen a plane crash around noon of August 1 near the Bay of Carqueiranne. A body wearing a French uniform was found several days later and was buried in Carqueiranne that September.

In 1998, a fisherman found what was reported to be Saint-Exupéry's silver chain bracelet in the ocean to the east of the island of Riou, south of Marseille. At first it was thought a hoax, but it was later positively identified. It was engraved with the names of his wife and his publishers, Reynal & Hitchcock, and was hooked to a piece of fabric from his pilot's suit.

On April 7, 2004, investigators from the French Underwater Archaeological Department confirmed that the twisted wreckage of a Lockheed P-38 Lightning, found on the seabed off the coast of Marseille in 2000 and extracted in October 2003, was Saint-Exupéry's. The discovery is akin to solving the mystery of where Amelia Earhart's plane went down in the Pacific Ocean in 1937. However, the cause of the crash remains a mystery. Today it is regarded as very improbable that Saint-Exupéry was shot down by a German pilot (in spite of the bragging of a German airman who later claimed so). The German aerial combat records of July 31, 1944 do not list any shooting down in the Mediterranean that day. Besides, the wreckage of Saint-Exupéry's P-38 did not show any traces of shooting or aerial combat. Therefore, it is regarded as most probable that the crash was caused by a technical failure.

If not always autobiographical, Saint-Exupéry's work is greatly inspired by his experiences as a pilot. An exception is The Little Prince, his most famous book, a poetic illustrated tale in which he imagines himself stranded in the desert where he meets The Little Prince, a young boy from a tiny asteroid. In many ways The Little Prince is a philosophical story, with emphasis on criticizing society and the excesses of the adult world. Nevertheless, the Little Prince contains elements from several earlier stories. The "temperamental rose" in the story was based on his wife Consuelo.

Notes
Saint-Exupéry and Consuelo were portrayed by Bruno Ganz and Miranda Richardson in the movie Saint-Ex: The Story Teller.
Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry wrote The Tale of the Rose a year or two after his disappearance, with the pain of loss still fresh in her heart, then put the manuscript away in a trunk. Two decades after her death in 1979, the manuscript finally came to light when José Martinez-Fructuoso, who was her heir and worked for her for many years, and his wife, Martine, discovered it in the trunk. Alan Vircondelet, author of a biography of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, edited it, improving her French and dividing it into chapters. Its publication in France in 2000, a full century after Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's birth on June 29, 1900, became a national sensation. It has been translated into sixteen languages. The heroic fighter pilot now has to make room for the impassioned new voice of his wife, who in the fifty years since his death has been virtually overlooked.
Saint-Exupéry is commemorated by a plaque in the Panthéon and until the euro was introduced in 2002, his image appeared on France's 50-franc note.