SAINT EXUPERY ANTOINE DE (1900-1944)

  2. Result
  3. SAINT EXUPERY ANTOINE DE (1900-1944)
  4. Lot n° 461 
Lot n° 461
Go to lot
Estimation :
50000 - 60000 EUR
Result with fees
Result : 45 500EUR
SAINT EXUPERY ANTOINE DE (1900-1944)
At the Center of the Desert, autograph manuscript, heavily crossed out and corrected. [January 1936]. 55 p. on 62 leaves in-4 of fi n paper, (f. 12, 24, 45 and 58 blank), bistre ink, black and blue pencil, partial autograph folio, bradel ivory vellum, long title on spine. A few tears and marginal folds, binding a little worn and rubbed. Precious first draft manuscript of chapter VII of Terre des hommes. Chapter VII of Terre des hommes, entitled Au centre du désert, is Saint Exupéry's account of a decisive episode in his life as a pilot. This exceptional, very elaborate manuscript corresponds in effect, with a few variations, to the 6 articles on his recent plane crash in the Libyan desert that Saint Exupéry published exclusively in L'Intransigeant, from 30 January to 4 February 1936. It is this intense account that will be considerably reworked to form the seventh chapter of Terre des hommes. "Saint-Exupéry wanted to beat André Japy's Paris-Saigon record before December 31, 1935, the deadline for the bonus awarded to the winner. He had a brand new plane, a Simoun equipped with a 180-horsepower Renault engine, in which he had just flown 11,000 kilometers around the Mediterranean Sea without incident. Having then serious money problems, he decided on Saturday December 28th after having consulted André Viaud, who had established the protection of all the great raids of the time, and asked his friend Jean Lucas to prepare the maps of the raid. [...] At 7.07 am, Saint-Exupéry, accompanied by his mechanic Prévot, left Le Bourget. Despite a forced stop in Marseille to repair a leaking tank, it only took him 19 hours and 38 minutes to cover 3,700 kilometres. He therefore had every chance of beating the Paris-Saigon record (Japy had taken 21 hours and 40 minutes to cover the same distance). It was 200 kilometers from Cairo that the flight, so well begun, was suddenly interrupted in the Cyrenaic desert. (Oeuvres complètes, I, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 2009, p. 1046). There follows a wandering of three days and four nights in the desert, punctuated by hallucinations, tortured by hunger and thirst under the burning sun... It ends providentially with the unexpected encounter of a Bedouin who saves the pilot and his mechanic by giving them water ("Water! Water, you have neither taste nor colour and yet you are the greatest wealth in the world. But you are also the most delicate, you who are so pure in the belly of the earth", f. 61). Besides survival, this miraculous rescue offers Saint Exupéry some of his most beautiful lines: "As for you who saved us, Bedouin of Lybia, you will nevertheless fade from my memory forever. I will never remember your face. You are Man and you appear to me with the face of all faces at once. You have never stared at us and yet you have recognized us. You are the beloved brother. And, in my turn, I will recognize you in all men." (Ibid.,p 268) PROVENANCE René Delange, friend and biographer of Saint Exupéry, editor of L'Intransigeant. Exhibition Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: exhibition organised for the second anniversary of his death, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, 1954, No. 86.
My orders
Sale information
Sales conditions
Return to catalogue