The Tale of the Rose Read Free

Buenos Aires, which is where the story of her life with “Tonio,” as she usually called him, begins.

    F OR ALL THAT IT TELLS about the two of them, there are many things Consuelo’s story silences. One scene, especially, echoes through their marriage in the recurrent, aching abandonment of every home they ever tried to establish, the strange sequence of nightmarish moments when Consuelo would walk into a house suddenly and inexplicably emptied of all its contents. For they were perpetually unable to find a place where they could stay and be together. All of their paradises were lost: the house in Buenos Aires; El Mirador outside of Nice; a whole series of apartments in Paris, Casablanca, and New York. No sooner had they settled in to some new location than the nameless imperative to move on, to move away, made itself felt once more.
    It happened in the summer of 1932, at the château of Saint-Maurice-de-Rémens, the wondrous setting of Saint-Exupéry’s childhood, the most vivid years of his life (“I’m not sure I have lived since my childhood,” he wrote to his mother from Buenos Aires). He—or the anonymous aviator who tells the story—would invoke Saint-Maurice in
The Little Prince:
“When I was a little boy I lived in an old house, and legend told us that a treasure was buried there. To be sure, no one had ever known how to find it; perhaps no one had ever even looked for it. But it cast an enchantment over that house. My home was hiding a secret in the depths of its heart . . .” A little more than a year after their wedding, the grown-ups with their strange ideas about matters of consequence and the businessmen with their endless, nonsensical figures finally conquered Saint-Maurice. It was sold to the nearby city of Lyons, and emptied out; all the familiar beds, armchairs, stoves, clocks, dishes, and toys that had surrounded him during those buried treasured days were lined up along the main street of the local village and auctioned off on two successive Sundays. Antoine and Consuelo, Comte and Comtesse de Saint-Exupéry—for the Saint-Exupérys were an old and titled family—wandered for a while among the things out on that street. While Antoine said good-bye to the irreplaceable objects of his youngest days, Consuelo, Paul Webster tells us, made a great show of her nonchalance, as if to reaffirm that none of it mattered to her, that she hadn’t married him for this, that she could live, as she says, with “never any luggage, nothing at all except my life, suspended from his.”

    A T HER WEDDING to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry on April 23, 1931, Consuelo wore black. It was perfectly understandable. She had already lost two husbands within a year of marrying them, and this latest one was known for his recklessness. Though Consuelo was a small and sometimes frail woman whose conversation, in moments of emotional crisis, was often punctuated with fits of coughing (a trait the Rose would share), it seemed likely, given the dangers of his profession and his passion for adventure, that this was yet another husband she was destined to outlive. And she did. Only this time the marriage lasted thirteen years. It produced no children, but it did produce
The Little Prince,
or was rather the rich, chaotic, and often painful reality from which it grew. Antoine wrote the book (Consuelo was adamant that credit for a work of art goes only to the artist who created it), but it was their marriage that gave rise to its sweetly dissonant and enduring central pair, the Little Prince and his Rose.
    Long before that, someone had noticed that Antoine and Consuelo together were like two characters out of a children’s story. Henri Jeanson, a friend who knew them during the first years of their marriage, wrote in his memoir, “I have never forgotten the way Saint-Ex looked at her. So fragile and small, she charmed him . . . she surprised him, she fascinated him; in short, he adored her. That little bird never kept still. She