Courrier Sud

In 1925, Saint-Exupéry met the leading figures of Éditions Gallimard — Gaston Gallimard, André Gide and Jean Schlumberger — in the Paris salon of his cousin Yvonne de Lestrange. These encounters would prove decisive for his entry into literature.

Before attempting the Aéropostale adventure in South America, Saint-Exupéry was sent to the naval aviation school in 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 Estiennes d’Orves, who would become his regular reader. He made only minor corrections, and the final proof was approved in early April 1929. The novel is a greatly expanded version of the short story L’Aviateur, published in the review Le Navire d’argent in 1926.

Published thanks to André Gide, who two years later would write the preface to Vol de nuit, 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 “he will write nothing that his own life does not guarantee, or that he has not had occasion to verify at his own expense. This is why the purely literary world remains suspect to him, insofar as it deceives the reader by transporting him into an easy and fallacious world. Saint-Exupéry remains one of those men bound to exactness, for whom imagination may 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).