Vol de nuit [Night Flight]
Paris, Gallimard, (November 14) 1935.
1 vol. (120 x 185 mm) of 181 p. and [1] f. Paperback, uncut.
The copy is enhanced with an autograph note: “With the author’s compliments, Antoine de Saint Exupéry”.
We apologize for the imperfect translation generated by Deepl for the purposes of the show.
In 1929, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who had become Operations Director of Aeroposta Argentina, was given the task of opening a route to Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, some 2,500 kilometres south of Buenos Aires. Two years after Courrier Sud, he delivers here a masterpiece and the confirmation of his talent, driven by a humanism, a passion for distant lands and for the men who explore and inhabit them. It was also a literary success: the book, with a preface by André Gide, was acclaimed by the public and, on the rue Sébastien-Bottin, people dreamt of winning a literary prize. He won the Fémina: an honour for him, ‘as surprised as he was touched to see [his] book so well crowned by women’, because they ‘seemed almost alien’ to his novel; ‘The man who dresses at night to take his watch in the sky, at the front of a postal plane, seems to be already detached from his home, […] and to consider the exercise of happiness as a game, a leisure. The pleasure of a night flight is so violent, that already at the window, following one’s flight, one takes on the soul of a hunter and I have seen many comrades, healthy and rugged men, no longer suffer any comparison between love and profession, as if they were finally going to occupy themselves with solid, serious, real things, and leave their wives with no apparent regret, and even a little disdainfully, with a naive pride on their part […]. […]. I’d like to talk to you about happiness. I’d like you to understand just how big a role it plays. And I imagine that it is to some extent yours, since we are rewarded by you with human virtues, the patience of a sick nurse, the devotion of an older sister. In short, the human virtues that recharge the heart and give the house the fragile face of happiness.
Vol de nuit sold over 150,000 copies and Jacques Guerlain, in tribute, launched a perfume of the same name. In the United States, the book – immediately translated [Night Flight] – became a bestseller and was selected for the Book of the Month Club.
Year after year, its success continued and, after the war, Night Flight was one of the first novels to be reissued in paperback (1953), in the Le Livre de poche collection, where it was number 3 (after Koenigsmark and Les Clés du royaume).
