“I’m taken by an imperishable desire to build souls.”

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900-1944)
French writer, poet, pilot and reporter

“It’s 1926, and he is 26 years old. Tall, with powerful shoulders, his face is still a bit childish, with a strong up-turned nose, and large slightly-protruding eyes full of life and goodness, eyelids which will soon become heavy, and finely shaped brows. He is virile and gentle, timid and courageous, pensive and jovial. He is very friendly and everyone loves him, from the top director down to the humblest mechanic – but familiarity, for him, stops at the bounds of respect. You can tell that he comes from a noble line, one that he will not forget even in his cordial simplicity. It is thus, and not as an aviation engineer, but as a winged-courrier of the gods, as one American admirer would call him, that Saint-Exupéry began navigating the skies, gambling with storms and darkness, fighting against the elements of a mysterious and unexpected force. His heart was weighed down with solicitude for all the secrets which he carried across the celestial dome to their final destination… In the evening he would return to his room, which was as bare as a monk’s cell, with a bed that was too short, and a corrugated tin roof, there where the days pass in unadorned silence… There, he realized that his intérior life grew stronger being cut off “from all there is to see and hear,” and that “man is animated first of all by invisible demands.” He felt the richness of his interior world in this empty creation where “words hold nothing more than sand.” At night, in his unlinked cursive he covered pages and pages, many of which he would tear up before the rise of the sun. (…) He meditated at length. His affection would overflow when one of his friends arrived. They baptized him Saint-Ex (and the nick-name stuck), but for local natives, he became the “Lord of the Sands.” (…) The pilot-writer extracts the sum of the beauty held captive in action, when that action is disinterested, full of mortal risk, and when it takes place on the pathway of the winds which turn on you capriciously, of stars which trick you subtly, and of shadows which swallow you whole.”

Renée Zeller (1887-1971)
Writer