July 2005: Friends met at the Feria de las Artes, in
old Palermo, Buenos Aires

This page features the various other writings of Brett Alan Sanders in the genres of essay, memoir, review, poetry and interview. Below is an excerpt from his essay titled "Saint-Exupery's Little Princesses," which appeared originally in Passport Journal's Summer 2006 issue. For more information on Brett's other writings, feel free to contact him.

Saint-Exupèry’s Little Princesses

“I dropped down to earth once somewhere in the world,” writes Antoine de Saint-Exupèry in his 1939 book Wind, Sand and Stars. “It was near Concordia, in the Argentine, but it might have been anywhere at all, for mystery is everywhere.”

This would have been January 1930. More than seventy-five years later, in June 2005, I find myself near the site of that accidental landing. It is dusk, an hour filled with its own natural mystery. I walk around the crumbling mansion where the legendary French pilot and author was fed and sheltered on that occasion. His sojourn there is marked by a plaque; above it towers Amanda May’s statue to Saint-Exupèry's most famous literary creation: the Little Prince astride his asteroid.

Saint-Exupèry describes the occasion in his chapter called “Oasis”, itself nestled, like life-giving Qu'ranic waters flowing beneath rare desert trees, in the heart of his life-and-death accounts of high adventure and philosophy on the mail routes of Africa and South America. “A minor mishap,” he writes, “had forced [him] down in a field,” and though “far from dreaming that [he] was about to live through a fairy-tale,” he was led, by the “unremarkable couple who took [him] in,” around a corner toward a clump of trees, behind it the mansion (known today as Castillo San Carlos: Saint Charles Castle) that housed the two little princesses (Suzanne and Edda Fuchs) who almost certainly gave birth in his imagination to the character of the Little Prince.

“What a queer house!” he writes. “Squat, massive, almost a citadel guarding behind its tons of stone I knew not what treasure. From the very threshold this legendary castle promised an asylum as assured, as peaceful, as secret as a monastery.”

The mansion was built by a Frenchman, Edouard Demachy, in 1888. Demachy, perhaps to avoid the payment of certain debts, disappeared in 1892, the property passing into government hands, and subsequently rented (in 1926, under a thirty-year lease) to another Frenchman, Georges Fuchs Vallon, who was living there with his wife and two young daughters when Saint-Exupèry chanced into their environs. According to one account, he had scarcely landed when he was approached by “two girls dressed in white who spoke French and for a moment he thought he was in heaven” (Travesaro), but the account in his book simply has him picked up by that unremarkable couple in their unremarkable old Ford. The girls, who only appear upon his arrival at the house, seem “astonished” to see him, and examine him “gravely” like “two judges posted on the confines of a forbidden kingdom.” They are introduced as the couple’s daughters and greet him “with a curious air of defiance” before disappearing. “I was amused and I was charmed,” Saint-Exupèry writes. “It was all as simple and silent and furtive as the first words of a secret.”

Inside, Saint-Exupèry falls in love with the place, which he finds in a state of finely kept decay: “Waxed, varnished and polished though it was, it swayed like a ship’s gangway. A strange house, evoking no neglect, no slackness, but rather an extraordinary respect.” Out of that confusion of secret passages and hidden wonders into which the girls have vanished, they reappear “[a]s mysteriously and as silently” at the call for supper. Their guest imagines that they have been feeding their dogs, their birds, “[opening] their windows on the bright night and [breathing] in the smell of the woods brought by the night wind. [And n]ow, unfolding their napkins, they were inspecting me cautiously out of the corners of their eyes, wondering whether or not they were going to make place for me among their domestic animals. For among others they had an iguana, a mongoose, a fox, a monkey, and bees. All these lived promiscuously together without quarreling in this new earthly paradise. The girls reigned over all the animals of creation, charming them with their little hands, feeding them, watering them, and telling them tales to which all, from mongoose to bees, gave ear.”

In a separate account of Saint-Exupèry’s visit, originally recounted by the author himself in the French magazine Marianne in 1932, and here by Horacio de Dios writing for the Buenos Aires newspaper La Nación, one of the girls climbs a tree and “finds herself face to face with a serpent.” She speaks to it, asking it, since she has meant it no harm, to not harm her. The serpent, apparently understanding, leaves her alone.

In his book, Saint-Exupèry tells a different story with snakes in it. Still at that original dinner table, his “taciturn young friends” continuing to study him, he hears a faint hiss under the table, feels something brush against his legs. Puzzled, he raises his brows. One of the girls comments, matter-of-fact: “It’s the snakes.” The two sisters study his reactions, then, and are evidently satisfied when he rather effortlessly smiles at the revelation. “I smiled,” he writes, “because my heart was light, because each moment this house was more and more to my liking.” And “[n]ow,” he continues, “it was my turn to look at them out of the corner of the eye. What shrewdness! what silent laughter behind those candid faces! And what sovereignty they exercised, these princesses guarded by snakes! Princesses for whom there existed no scorpion, no wasp, no serpent, but only little souls of animals!”

It seems natural, then, that Saint-Exupèry should begin The Little Prince with an account of a child’s drawings – one from the outside, one from the inside; the latter for the instruction of foolish adults who have mistaken the first one for a hat – of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant.

It would certainly be over-stating the matter to suggest that The Little Prince was conceived whole at this South American table.

The long-eared desert fox who appears in it, for instance, is owed to “a crash landing in the Libyan Desert” (Hoehne), which is also recounted in a later chapter of Wind, Sand and Stars. The prickly rose at story’s center, whom the Little Prince hopes is still waiting for him on Asteroid B-612, is obviously inspired by his tempestuous relationship with his Salvadorean wife Consuelo Suncín Sandoval, met and wooed in Buenos Aires (Riding). The larger part of the book was written, for that matter, far from that peculiar mansion in the Argentine province of Entre Ríos, “in a borrowed house in Northport, N.Y.” (ibid.).

Yet there can be little doubt that the peculiar, charming sovereignty that the character of his Little Prince continues to exercise over the hearts of Saint-Exupèry’s readers was born in the attitude of those little Argentine princesses encountered by chance in a mysterious kingdom of their own making.

Now, as I stand outside the ruins of the Castillo San Carlos, destroyed between a 1938 fire (Travesaro) and subsequent looting (De Dios), the sun disappears at last beneath the horizon. The castle vanishes in shadows while from a height I contemplate the glimmering spectacle of Salto, Uruguay, whose lights beckon like distant stars from the other side of Saint-Exupèry’s grand universe.

Sources

De Dios, Horacio, “Oasis de El Principito”, La Nación Line, 21 December 2003, downloaded from www.lanacion.com.ar on 26 October 2005.

Hoehne, Peggy, “The Little Prince”, Suite101.com, 21 July 2004, downloaded from www.Suite101.com on 27 October 2005.

Riding, Alan, “Romance of a Prickly Rose and a Starry Prince”, The New York Times on the Web, 7 June 2000, downloaded from http://partners.nytimes.com on 27 October 2005.

Saint-Exupèry, Antoine, Wind, Sand and Stars, translated from the French by Lewis Galantière, 1992 edition, New York: A Harcourt Brace Modern Classic, 229 pages.

Temakel, cultural website of Esteban Ierardo, “¿Aquí nació El Principito?”, with photos by Ierardo and Spanish text by Saint-Exupéry, downloaded from www.temakel.com/osolarscarlos.htm on 27 October 2005.

Travesaro, Belén, “Concordia: Un cuento de hadas y fantasía: El castillo San Carlos guarda historias fascinantes como la visita de Saint Exupéry”, La Capital on line, 16 June 2002, downloaded from www.lacapital.com.ar on 27 October 2005.

© Copyright Brett Alan Sanders.