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Outside Magazine, August 2004

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The Hard Way
Goodnight Sweet Prince

By Mark Jenkins

EN ROUTE FROM LYON, in southern France, flying across the Ligurian Sea to Corsica, the plane was lost. It was a beautiful day in late July 1944, and the world was at war for the second time in as many generations. The pilot, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, now the famous author of seven books, was returning from an unarmed, solo reconnaissance mission to the Rhône Valley.

Patriotic to the marrow, Saint-Exupéry had, through utter force of personality, managed to inveigle himself a dangerous flying assignment for the Allies, despite the fact that he was 44 years old and showing the strains of a tumultuous life. Over the past 15 years he had survived innumerable airplane crashes, but two in particular had left lasting scars: a smashup en route to Egypt in 1935, followed by a five-day, 125-mile trek across the Libyan desert, in which he nearly died of thirst; and an accident in Guatemala that caused serious head wounds and a half-dozen broken bones. Add to these wrecks the tender disaster of a difficult marriage. Worse, the boundless wild world he had known as a mail pilot in West Africa—where survival was dependent on ingenuity, improvisation, and pluck—was gone.

Now, bent on helping liberate France at all costs, Saint-Exupéry was flying a highly sophisticated aircraft he detested and only marginally understood. The American-made Lockheed Lightning P-38's control panel had 148 knobs and dials and was one of the fastest planes of its time. On almost every previous sortie in the P-38, he had experienced potentially fatal problems—engine failure or malfunction, a wing fire, near asphyxiation from a faulty oxygen mask. He had flown low over enemy territory and inexplicably survived. He had been pursued by enemy fighters and barely escaped. Like fuel leaking from a bullet hole in a wing tank, the good luck Saint-Exupéry had once had as a young mail pilot was dribbling away.

He took off at 8:30 a.m. from Bastia, on the northeastern coast of Corsica, due back in four hours. He didn't return. By 2:30 he would have been out of fuel. At 3:30 he was reported missing and presumed dead.

For more than half a century, friends, family, reporters, and writers opined on how Saint-Exupéry might have died. Perhaps he experienced engine trouble and crashed in the Alps. Perhaps he was shot down over the Mediterranean. Perhaps he failed to properly use the oxygen equipment and blacked out. Even suicide was suggested, an act inconsistent with the pattern and pride of his life: Saint-Exupéry was willing to die for his country, but only at the hands of the enemy or the elements.

It is hard to imagine a more poignant and fitting way for Saint-Exupéry to have left this planet than by vanishing into oblivion. This is precisely what happens to the boy in his best-known work, The Little Prince, a slim autobiographical parable published in 1943 and since translated into 80 languages. "You understand . . . it is too far. I cannot carry this body with me," the title character, a phantasmal spirit of adventure, says. "It is too heavy. But it will be like an old abandoned shell. There is nothing sad about old shells." And with that, there is a "flash of yellow close to his ankle," and the Little Prince evaporates.

It is HARD TO IMAGINE a more fitting way for Saint-Exupéry to have left this planet than by VANISHING INTO OBLIVION.

Last fall, 59 years after Saint-Exupéry's enigmatic disappearance, the wreckage of a P-38 was discovered a mile and a half off the southern coast of France near Marseille. Winched up from the mud of the Mediterranean, it was positively identified in April as Saint-Exupéry's aircraft. The discovery placed boundaries on the mystery but did not solve it: No trace of his remains was found.

Still, the precise circumstances of Saint-Exupéry's death are insignificant. Stacy Schiff, author of the 1994 Saint-Exupéry: A Biography, believes it could have been pilot error. "But does it really matter?" asked Schiff when I spoke to her recently, and then she answered herself: "No. All reconnaissance pilots ran huge risks. His death was a matter of probability. What is so thrilling was Saint-Exupéry's life, a ragged, glorious series of close calls."

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Outside columnist MARK JENKINS's latest book is The Hard Way.

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