Pilote de guerre [Flight to Arras]
New York, Éditions de la Maison française, [1942].
1 vol. (185 x 230 mm) of 253 p. Midnight blue half morocco with bands, gilt title, gilt top, preserved cover and spine, bordered case (binding signed by A. [lain] Lobstein).
One of the first 25 copies on Strathmore (after a single copy reserved for the author).
This one is nominative for the Countess of Montgomery.
Presentation copy, inscribed: “with all my deep friendship, Antoine Saint-Exupéry”.
We apologize for the imperfect translation generated by Deepl for the purposes of the show.
“I will fight anyone who tries to enslave the freedom of man to one individual – or to a mass of individuals.” Before following up this fight, in which he would lose his life, demobilized after the ‘Phoney War’, Saint-Exupéry took refuge in the United States, and it was in New York that he wrote these lines. This edition, published in February 1942, is also the first complete edition, as it includes (p. 34) the seven words of a sentence in which the author collectively refers to his orderly, a bigwig of the general staff and Hitler “who started this insane war” as “imbeciles” and whose censorship in France will require its removal in the Gallimard edition of December 1942. The text appeared in pre-original form, in English, in January 1942 in the magazine Atlantic Monthly, then in volume the following month: the work would be at the top of the bestseller list for six months: “this book is a great and beautiful book, perhaps the true book of the 1939 war” wrote Pierre Mac Orlan in the newspaper Les Temps nouveaux on January 8, 1943.
A fine copy presented to the Countess of Montgomery: born in Paris in 1899, Madeleine de Montgomery spent her childhood at the Château de Fervaques, acquired in 1831 by her great-grandfather, the Marquis de Portes. From 1930, she held a very popular fair in her sumptuous apartment at 77 Avenue de Malakoff. Young, elegant and influential, her beauty and personality made her receptions one of the most popular places in Paris, and the literary world flocked there: publishers, press bosses and writers. Kessel, Cocteau, Malraux and Colette were regulars, as was Saint-Exupéry, who visited several times, especially as the young woman was passionate about aviation and owned her own aircraft, a Morane-Saulnier, with which she was pictured in a photograph published on the front page of Le Figaro in May 1935.
The mistress of the press magnate Jean Prouvost, she went on to become the editor of the newspaper Marie-Claire, which her lover launched in 1937. During the war, she acted as a true heroine of the Resistance, taking refuge in Normandy where she founded a maternal and child center in her manor to take in the many children of mobilized soldiers; she then became director of the women’s and health sections of the French Mission to the Red Cross in the United States in 1943. It was probably during this stay in New York that she was able to meet Saint-Exupéry again: a reunion of sufficient major importance for him to give her a personalized copy of his book. She followed up her fair after the war and was mentioned several times in the diary of Pierre Lazareff, who saw her as “Diana the huntress with fine, sinewy features, with her ash-gray hair, aquamarine eyes and long, slender hands that accentuated each of her sentences like so many exclamation marks, she inspired by her mere presence endless tournaments of ideas and eloquence”.
It was also during this mission to New York that she met the man who would become her husband in 1946: General Antoine Béthouart, Companion of the Liberation and figurehead of the Free French military command during the Second World War. The very same man, promoted to major general and appointed head of the Military Mission in Washington, met Saint-Exupéry at the beginning of 1943: he was going there to negotiate with the American government the delivery of equipment to re-equip the French army. But above all, it was he who would sign, on April 1, 1943, the long-awaited mission order that a desperate Saint-Exupéry was eager to obtain in order to serve his country. His friends tried to change his mind, but on May 4, 1943, after a hasty departure and while The Little Prince was in the process of being published, he arrived in Algiers where Georges Pélissier was waiting for him in Algiers; Béthouart would join him a few months later, in November 1943, when he was appointed Chief of Staff of National Defense in Algiers and promoted to Lieutenant General. In this capacity, he would accompany General de Gaulle on his various trips to Rome, London and would disembark with him in Courseulles in Normandy on June 14, 1944.
This leading copy of Saint-Exupéry’s great text on the Second World War is of very fine provenance.
We also know of the copies given to Consuelo, Léon Werth, Bernard Lamotte, Jane Lawton, Curtice Hitchcock, Elisabeth Reynal, Jacques Maritain, Isaac Molho, Anne Morrow and Charles Lindbergh, Natalie Paley, Nadia Boulanger and Lewis Galantière.
