The summer sun was at its zenith in a cloudless sky when Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's French air force reconnaissance plane tumbled into the Mediterranean in July 1944, killing the author of The Little Prince, and creating a necessary hero in a country humbled by defeat and collaboration.
As the centenary of his birth on June 29 approaches, the mystery of his final moments has yet to be solved - no body nor plane was found - but his reputation as the greatest cultural figure to die "pour la France" in the second world war has spiralled far beyond the sun to orbit alongside The Little Prince's asteroid.
The Panthéon in Paris has a six-month exhibition to commemorate his exploits as a pioneer pilot, and his reputation as a humanist author of five slim books plus the philosophical-religious message published posthumously as Wisdom Of The Sands. He was born in south-eastern Lyon and the city's airport will be named after him during forthcoming months of intense national commemorations that coincide with a flood of books, broadcasts and conferences.
The chateau at Saint-Maurice de Reméns, central to his idyllic recollections of childhood, will become the seat of an international foundation to complement another institute in Paris and a rash of renamed avenues, schools and public buildings. Saint-Exupéry is the only 20th-century writer to figure on a French banknote and will soon have his own set of stamps.
Some may feel that all this is a little extravagant for an author who had not the intellectual capacity of Jean-Paul Sartre, nor the story-telling skill of François Mauriac, nor the charisma of André Malraux: three of the many rivals trailing behind in the glory stakes. Adulation for Saint-Exupéry, the repentant supporter of the wartime Vichy regime [which operated during the Nazi occupation], who sacrificed his life to regain his honour, arouses extravagant homage. To his great-niece, Nathalie des Vallières, who runs the Paris institute, he is "the archangel". To his mistress, Nelly de Vogüé, now 92, he remains "Christ-like", and as far as his literary executor, Frédéric d'Agay, is concerned:
"You will never understand Saint-Exupéry unless you see him as a modern knight-errant of the highest moral principles." So far so good. Except there is a ghost hovering over this canoni sation ceremony. His widow, the exuberant Latin-American Consuelo Suncin, who died in 1979, is attracting almost as much attention with the posthumous publication of her vitriolic memoirs and the first biography tracing the transformation of an amoral woman into Saint-Exupéry's idealised representation of femininity, the Rose, in the classic children's book, The Little Prince (1943).
"My greatest regret is not dedicating the book to you," Saint-Exupéry wrote after completing his fable while in American exile, during a reconciliation with his estranged wife. Decoded, the central theme of the allegory parallels Saint-Exupéry's own wanderlust, his contempt for the consumer age, his meeting with other "roses", and his recognition that he had made a commitment to take care of the unique flower on asteroid B-612, for all her vanity.
"I should have judged her by her deeds not her words," he writes in the book, which is less a childlike fantasy than a parable about the obligations of conjugal love. "Tonio" and Consuelo, a literary groupie who saw herself as the Alma Mahler of Central America, met in 1930 in Buenos Aires. He was a mail-service pilot living out the adventures that inspired his 1931 novel, Night Flight, and she was there to collect the widow's pension for her second husband, Enrique Gomez Carrillo, a Guatemalan writer and Argentina's consul-general in Paris.
She was nearly 30 and Saint-Exupéry was nine months older. Both had led reckless lives. Antoine, who was three when his father died, had been fascinated by aviation since his first flight at the age of 12 and had qualified as a pilot during national service. In 1926, he joined the Aéropostale service, and between then and his marriage in April 1931, he survived spectacular crashes, desert storms, rebel attacks and pioneered the airline route from Buenos Aires to Patagonia, all of which provided material for his 1938 collection of newspaper articles, Wind, Sand and Stars. Consuelo, daughter of a Pipil Indian coffee planter in El Salvador, was 19 years old when she abandoned a 60-year-old poet-lawyer fiance, before marrying a dashing Mexican captain in the US.
She was widowed a few months later during the civil war with Pancho Villa: then dumped another lover to become the mistress of Jose Vasconcelos, a Mexican intellectual and failed presidential candidate who nicknamed her a "tropical Scheherazade". During an exile in Paris where Consuelo joined him, Vasconcelos assembled the notes for the middle volume of his autobiography, The Torment, in which he describes his passion for a woman "with a viper's tongue and a musical body" who drove him wild with jealousy.
After she left him for the bisexual Gomez Carrillo, Vasconcelos, in revenge, immortalised her under the nickname of Charito, Spain's most notorious striptease artist. Only after Consuelo had assuaged another passion with the erotically supercharged Italian author, Gabriele d'Annunzio, did she marry Tonio on the recommendation of the Belgian writer, Maurice Maeterlinck.
He saw the aristocratic pilot as potentially "the best French writer of the 20th century". This was remarkable prescience. Saint-Ex still tops the all-time national best seller list with The Little Prince, which has been translated into about 100 languages, and has a million international sales a year; it was voted France's most popular 20th-century book in a millennium media poll. Three of his books are in French all-time top 20.
André Gide, Saint-Exupéry's literary godfather, had no time for Consuelo, who was also dismissed by one of her in-laws, Simone de Saint-Exupéry, as a "tart" and a "Comtesse du cinéma". The denigration has not decreased 20 years after her death. "Marrying a foreigner was considered worse than marrying a Jew," one of Saint-Exupéry's family told me, summing up the monarchist, anti-semitic and fiercely xenophobic family whose nobility dates back to the 12th century.
Saint-Exupéry broke away from many of its suffocating principles, not least the anti-semitism: his wartime work, Flight To Arras, was banned by both the Nazis and the Vichy government because he had praised the courage of a Jewish officer. Marrying Consuelo, after a coup de foudre while he was taking her for a spin over Buenos Aires, was another break from convention.
Family embarrassment at his defiance of aristocratic tradition can be inferred from the first biography, written by Nelly de Vogüé in 1949 under the pen-name Pierre Chevrier. Nelly, one of France's richest women, dismisses Consuelo in a dozen words, and Consuelo disappeared from subsequent books on Saint-Exupéry's life until I "rehabilitated" her in my 1993 biography. To Saint-Exupéry purists, that book was iconclastic. Mentioning some of his weaker characteristics, including compulsive womanising, unimpressive aviation skills, childishness and egoism, often causes a rumpus during public debates where Saint-Ex fans are as zealous as religious fundamentalists. But a frank assessment of character caused less reaction then revelations about his attachment to the wartime Vichy regime and his hatred for De Gaulle, whom he described as a "new Hitler", thus offending the Free French leader so deeply that De Gaulle joined the Nazis and Vichy in banning Saint-Exupéry's writings.
The author's distant support for Vichy in the first three years of the war still enrages both Gaullists and the left, who consider Saint-Exupéry little more than a outmoded sentimental reactionary. But the debate has been eclipsed by accusations of hypocrisy: he preached solidarity among men while treating women with contempt.
"Why can't you be here to wipe my brow and make me tea?" he complained in a letter to Consuelo; he accused her of wrecking his life by constant party-going. It seems that Consuelo's belated answer has come with the publication of a long-forgotten manuscript - now published as The Rose's Memoir - giving her view of the 13-year marriage. In this, she accuses her husband of making her suffer all the evils of absences and love affairs that she was supposed to have inflicted on him.
According to the typescript, finished in 1947, he was cruel, negligent, greedy, self-centred and wasteful. He abandoned her in a psychiatric hospital; and, when they were living separately, tricked her into letting him sleep in her house to scupper divorce proceedings, because he depended on the fortune she inherited from Gomez Carrillo. The work is an ugly account by a very embittered widow. She had second thoughts about releasing it, and never showed it to a publisher; but 21 years after her death, her heirs have the satisfaction of seeing at the top of the non-fiction list.
It has begun a feud with the Saint-Exupéry family, which feels justified in excluding Consuelo's photo from bookshop centenary exhibitions and conferences sponsored by the family. Almost at the last minute, the Saint-Exupéry supporters have been given a remarkable weapon - the accusation that Consuelo did not, in fact, write the book. At best, it is argued, she dictated the work to her lover, Denis de Rougement, the Swiss author of L'Amour Et L'Occident (Consuelo rejected his offers of marriage because he was "too Protestant").
He is the voice of the wise Fox in The Little Prince. Curtis Cate, an American biographer who knew Consuelo, is among those who believe that the book is a really a fiction, recalling that she was a "born liar" who constantly rewrote her life story to make herself out a victim. Even more damaging for the book's credibility is an investigation by a Swiss journalist, Christian Campich, who published a police analysis showing that a page of the manuscript released as a proof that Consuelo was the author was in the handwriting of De Rougement.
There are enough inconsistencies and fabricated sequences in the memoirs to make them merely interesting documents rather than true accounts, but from a literary point of view there is a worse betrayal than that of the disgruntled rose. De Rougemont was a close friend of Saint-Exupéry, helping him create The Little Prince, and yet he seems to have collaborated in the writing of these 275 pages of character assassination.
The centenary celebrations will probably play down the conjugal row until June 29, when the pres ident and poets will join in a panegyric to Saint-Exupéry. But after, Consuelo's own centenary will be celebrated with a French film of her life, scheduled to begin shooting in the autumn. There are many twists in the plot, including her decision to take her revenge on Saint-Exupéry's haughty family by leaving her half-share of all the writer's royalties (as well as her house) to her gardener-chauffeur, Jose Fructuoso Martinez, who owns a mass of documents that can only be published when the quarrelling heirs come to some agreement.
Among them are at least 500 love letters. Meanwhile, the battle to extinguish her memory continues. Reference to her has been expunged from all the ceremonies organised by Saint-Exupéry supporters, including the three days of celebrations in Lyon. "We just don't want anything to do with Consuelo," D'Agay says.
The boycott is justified by Nathalie des Vallières, bywho says that Consuelo was "not a Saint-Exupéry". There are many reasons to believe that Saint-Exupéry, missing in action, would not approve of the boycott of his wife's memory. An underwater search for his plane led to the recent discovery of part of the missing P-38 Lightning aircraft and recovered a silver identity bracelet engraved with the names Antoine and Consuelo. Romantics see the bracelet as Saint-Exupéry's last sign of devotion, a message from the deep to discredit the anti-Consuelo lobby.
Even more eloquent is this extract from one of his last love letters, written from a North African airforce base: "Consuelo, thank you from the bottom of my heart for being my wife. If I am wounded, I have the one who will take care of me. If I am killed I will have the one I want to wait for in eternity. Consuelo, all our legal wranglings, all our disputes are dead." Or so he thought.