A tumultuous married life, and a masterpiece.
The couple Antoine and Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry left behind the memory of a stormy relationship, as well as the famous "Little Prince", but also a conflict between their heirs.
A luminous correspondence of the couple, recounting fourteen years of intimate exchanges, could however make forget these differences.
These more than 160 letters and telegrams sent by the spouses between 1930 and 1944 are published Thursday, May 6 by Gallimard, in an edition rich in illustrations: sketches of the aviator, to which correspond drawings by the artist that she was. , photographs, various memories.
Him: "Consuelo darling, you do not understand that you are making me suffer".
She: "I cry with emotion, I'm so afraid of being exiled from your heart ...
These two whole personalities, a husband who was of all adventures and a woman loving above all his independence, have known as many happy times as difficult.
"Consuelo was of an exuberant temperament, and he was very depressed. Her multiple loves are not the sign of a Don Juanism, but of an emotional wandering", comments Alain Vircondelet, a biographer interviewed by AFP.
The epistolary exchanges show that nothing really separated them, even the distance, until the mysterious death of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, during a mission in the Mediterranean in July 1944.
A conflict between heirs
The first letter from the aviator, to Buenos Aires, where he fell in love with this Salvadoran woman, already outlines his most famous work. "I remember a not very old story, I change it a bit: once upon a time there was a child who had discovered a treasure. But this treasure was too beautiful for a child whose eyes did not know how to understand it well. arms contain it. Then the child became melancholy ".
"Saint-Ex" did not have time to see the prodigious success of his tale "The Little Prince", published in 1943 in New York, nor the publication of the Parisian edition in 1946. She did.
The family counts today "200 million copies sold and more than 450 translations" of this book, of which it draws a beautiful check every year, even if the amount remains unknown.
It is an agreement of 1947 which regulates the succession of a writer who left neither descendant nor will.
In Consuelo half of the income from the work.
To the Saint-Exupéry family, the other half, plus moral rights, namely that they must give their consent to everything relating to the author's universe.
When Consuelo died in 1979, she bequeathed her rights to her secretary, the Spaniard José Martinez Fructuoso.
And the clash with the branch from Antoine's sister, Gabrielle d'Agay, will go to court.
A reconciliation around this correspondence
José Martinez Fructuoso was sentenced in 2008 after having published the writer's writings in "Antoine et Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry, un amour de legend" (Éd. Les Arènes, 2005).
But in 2014, the d'Agays were in turn forced to pay him income from a cartoon on "The Little Prince".
Gallimard now exposes reconciliation.
The foreword by Martine Martinez Fructuoso, widow of the secretary of Consuelo, precedes that of Olivier d'Agay, grand-nephew of Antoine.
"This work would not have seen the light of day without the collaboration between the Antoine de Saint-Exupéry-d'Agay Estate and the Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry Estate", wrote the aviator's family in a press release at the end of April. It recalled "an unsuccessful 18-year legal war to obtain joint ownership of copyright".
The academic Alain Vircondelet, not consulted for this edition, warns, however: "Not all of Consuelo's letters are there. Of course I am delighted that this edition is coming out, even if 20 years of my work have been ignored. But Martine Martinez has a colossal treasure in Saint-Exupéry, and every time she talks to me about it I fall from the clouds ".
He will reveal another small part of it, in a book to be published in August, on the genesis of the "Little Prince" on Long Island, in the United States.
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