When Antoine de Saint-Exupéry survived four plane crashes

phew! A breakdown. In the Sahara of all places. “Something broke on my engine. And since I had neither a mechanic nor passengers with me, I set about the difficult repair all by myself. It was a matter of life and death for me, I had drinking water with me for barely eight days. The first night I fell asleep in the sand. A thousand miles from any inhabited area. I was much more abandoned than a shipwrecked man on a raft in the middle of the ocean. So you can imagine my surprise when, at daybreak, a strange little voice woke me up: 'Please... draw me a sheep!'”

With this request, one of the most famous characters in world literature enters the scene: the little prince. The French edition appears on April 6, 1943. Incidentally, first in the USA, where the author, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900–1944), temporarily fled in 1940 from German-occupied France. In France itself, "Le Petit Prince" was published in 1946 by Gallimard, where Saint-Exupéry published his first books as early as the 1920s, novels about flying such as "Südkurier" or "Nachtflug".

Because flying is his life. Since his teenage years, and especially since his military service in a French air regiment, Saint-Exupéry has been a passionate pilot and has been adventurously taking part in the globalization of air traffic. In 1926 he was hired by the Hispano-African air mail line Latécoère, and in 1929 by Aeroposta Argentina in Buenos Aires.

There, on September 3, 1930, he also met Consuela Gómez Carillo, his future wife. The two married in France in 1931. She calls him "Tonnio, love". He writes to her: "You are more beautiful than Greta Garbo!" The correspondence between Antoine and Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry has just been published in German by Karl Rauch Verlag: "The Prince and the Rose". In the volume one learns a lot about their stormy love and the tragically frequent separation.

He's not just a pilot, he's also a test pilot, controls planes, seaplanes, everything. In December 1933, he narrowly escaped death when he crash-landed off the coast of Saint-Raphaël. And on the night of December 30-31, 1935, Saint-Exupéry crashed in the Egyptian desert (he and his mechanic André Prévot wanted to set a record for long-distance flights on the Paris-Saigon route). It is this accident that gives Saint-Exupéry the experience of thirst and the encounter with a desert fox. For four days they wander through the desert until they are accidentally rescued, which can be read in the bestseller “Wind, Sand and Stars” and in “The Little Prince”, the fairy tale that some condemn as kitsch while it gives solace to many, in more than 180 languages .

Saint-Exupéry experienced his worst aviation accident in February 1938 in Guatemala City, and since then his ear has been ringing for life. In May 1940, Saint-Exupéry, pilot of a French reconnaissance squadron, came under German fire (read more in “Flight to Arras”). Saint-Exupéry survived a total of four plane crashes (twice as many as Hemingway).

"I never felt so in danger," he wrote to her in 1943. With dark forebodings, he became a war pilot again, completing reconnaissance flights over Algeria and southern France. Consuela writes to him from New York "Come back!". On August 31, 1944, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry took off on his last reconnaissance flight. As is known today, his P38 Lightning was shot down by Germans near Toulon, allegedly by Horst Rippert, the brother of Rolf Rippert, who was known as the singer Ivan Rebroff. The wreck was only located in 2000 and recovered in 2003.

It is said that all writer's life is paper. In this series, we present evidence to the contrary.