Courrier Sud

It was in 1925, in the Parisian salon of his cousin Yvonne de Lestrange, that Saint-Exupéry met the leading figures of Éditions Gallimard: Gaston Gallimard, André Gide and Jean Schlumberger. These encounters would play a decisive role in his entry into literature.

Before attempting the Aéropostale adventure in South America, Saint-Exupéry was sent to the naval aviation school at Brest for an advanced training course. It was there that he received the first proofs of his book, from which he read passages to his cousin Honoré d’Estienne d’Orves, who would become his regular reader. He made only minor corrections, and the final proof was signed off in early April 1929. The book is a much-expanded version of the short story L’Aviateur, published in the review Le Navire d’argent in 1926.

Published thanks to André Gide, who would write the preface to Vol de nuit two years later, Courrier Sud carries a preface by André Beucler, who was the first to argue that “Saint-Exupéry is not a writer” — an idea later taken up and developed by André Malraux: Saint-Exupéry was no armchair author, and would write nothing that his own life did not guarantee or that he had not verified at his own risk. For him the purely literary universe remained suspect insofar as it deceived the reader by transporting him into an easy and misleading world. Saint-Exupéry remained one of those men bound to exactness, for whom imagination might supplement reality but never replace it.

A very fine copy: from the library of Marcel de Merre (bookplate; sale, Paris, Sotheby’s, 2007, no. 436).