Vol de nuit

In 1929, having become operations director of the airline Aeroposta Argentina, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was tasked with opening a route to Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, some 2,500 kilometers south of Buenos Aires. Two years after Courrier Sud (Southern Mail), he produced a masterpiece confirming his literary talent, imbued with humanism and a passion for remote lands and the men who explored and inhabited them. It was also a literary triumph: prefaced by André Gide, the book won public favor, and at the offices of rue Sébastien-Bottin there was already talk of a literary prize.

By September, Vol de nuit had made the final Goncourt shortlist, in competition with Philippe Hériat’s L’Innocent and Jacques Chardonne’s Claire. Yet, a victim of its own success, the novel instead won the Prix Femina on 4 December, a prize created in 1904 by twenty-two women in protest against the Goncourt. The members of the prestigious Académie, presumably displeased at having the rug pulled from under them, gave their votes instead to Jean Fayard for Mal d’amour, a novel overloaded with clichés about women. A pointed reply, perhaps, but one that reflects well on the ladies of the Femina: Saint-Exupéry responded with genuine emotion, confessing he had been “as surprised as touched to see my book so honored by women,” since they had seemed to him “almost foreign” to his novel — one built around men, flight and the solitary rigors of night duty. He wrote of wanting to convey the greatness of that role, and likened the reward he received from women to “human virtues, the patience of a nurse at a sickbed, the devotion of an elder sister” — the virtues that restore the heart and give happiness its fragile face within the home.

The Femina award provoked jealousy and hostility, expressed with some violence in a press that had been so favorable only six months earlier, at the time of the book’s publication. Saint-Exupéry was criticized for his mysticism and a precious, mannered style; and, apart from the loyalty of a few heroes of aviation (Mermoz was among the first to congratulate him on his prize), he faced equally sharp criticism within aviation circles itself: fellow pilots, recalling his early mistakes and mishaps, resented seeing him become France’s most celebrated aviator not through professional achievement but through a literary glory they felt was undeserved.

The public paid no attention to these poisoned darts. Vol de nuit sold more than 150,000 copies, and Jacques Guerlain even released a perfume of the same name in tribute. In the United States, the book — immediately translated as Night Flight — became a bestseller and was selected by the Book of the Month Club. Vol de nuit was also among the first novels reissued in paperback format in 1953, in the Livre de Poche series, where it appeared as no. 3 (after Koenigsmark and Les Clés du royaume).

A precious copy inscribed by the author to Pol Neveux, one of the ten members of the Académie Goncourt, to which he had been elected in 1924, occupying the second seat (formerly held by Huysmans, Renard and Guitry, and since 2016 by Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt). An inscription that anticipates the literary rentrée of September and the battle for the prize.