Un feuillet manuscrit autographe de "Terre des Hommes"

Original autograph manuscript by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, one page in black ink on a yellow paper sheet, numerous corrections, and rewritings.

Exceptional working manuscript of a passage from the original French version of Wind Sand and Stars [Terre des Hommes] from chapter VI "Dans le désert", a magnificent ode to the barren wilderness of deserts doomed to disappear due to the inevitable development of the industrial age. This section from the original French novel was removed for the English version translated by Galantière and remains unpublished in English. Moreover, the final two paragraphs of the manuscript are unpublished in the original French version. Saint-Exupéry recalls magnificent memories of liberating adversity and cherished "dissidence" he experienced in the heart of Mauritanian and Libyan deserts.
This heavily corrected state of the text is the true genesis of Saint-Exupéry's Pulitzer Prize winning masterpiece: he reworked and rearranged here his memories published as articles (reportages) in Paris-Soir magazine in 1938. Some sentences ("What does it matter what you find at the pole if you walk in a state of enchantment") remaining in the published version are variants of one of his reportages, present in the manuscript among redacted and unpublished sentences obscured by pen strokes.

This manuscript indicates an early writing stage not mentioned in the “Notes et variantes” of the comprehensive Pléiade edition.
The passage is originally from his fifth article for Paris-Soir, entitled "La magie du désert c'est ça" ("This is the magic of the desert ") from November 14, 1938 published with some of the changes made in this manuscript and other later corrections at the end of the sixth chapter of Terre des Hommes. The central theme of the text, dissidence, is mentioned in the very first sentence of the manuscript and would later become the title of the passage indicated on the typed proofs. This leitmotiv is steeped in nostalgia, with vivid descriptions of fleeting moments of freedom during the writer's escapades in the desert: "The horizons [crossed out : places] towards which we ran one after the other faded away ['died out one after the other' in the published text], like those insects once trapped by lukewarm hands ['which lose their color once trapped in lukewarm hands ' idem]. But there was no illusion ['he who pursued them was not the victim of illusion' idem]. We were not mistaken, when we walked like this from miracle to miracle ['we were after these discoveries' idem]. Nor was the Sultan of the Thousand and One Nights, who ran one morning ['pursued a matter so subtle' idem] [sentence deleted], that his beautiful captives, one by one, died at dawn in his arms, having lost, scarcely touched, the gold of their wings"

It conveys an acute awareness of the end of an era, marked by the bankruptcy of Aéropostale and his grave plane accident in Guatemala. Saint-Exupéry takes refuge in the memory of the rebel-filled deserts of Mauritania whose charm wore off with the passing of time: "But there is no more dissidence. Cap Juby, Cisneros, Puerto Cansado, Dora, Smarra, there is no longer any [word struck out] mystery." It is followed by descriptions of the lands he and his fellow aviators flew over: "For the pure shell powder sand and the forbidden palm groves, gave us their most precious gift: they offered only an hour of fervor, and we were the ones who dwelled in it" The story is told in plural, honoring the memory of Guillaumet and Mermoz, his friends and famous aviators who fell from the sky. The manuscript also contains a prophetic remark on the deserts soon to be exploited for their resources: "We fed on the magic of the sands, others perhaps will dig their oil wells there, and benefit from their [deleted: this] goods." We can already see the businessman character in The Little Prince, an early manifestation of his opinion on the excesses of human progress.

These words on a thin sheet of yellow paper represent a crucial early stage of his masterpiece. Saint-Exupéry first assembled the work under its original title, Etoiles par grand vent, published in France as Terre des Hommes in February 1939. We know of another sheet of paper in this color with the same types of corrections, also not mentioned in the Pléiade edition of the complete works. It shows the more direct handwriting of a first draft - the sheet undoubtedly dating from the first combination of his journalistic reportages that would later become the novel. Virtually every sentence is modified (words crossed out, words or expressions rearranged in the sentence) not systematically appearing in the published version: "What we see here is a very subtle work of reworking texts that function in very different ways depending on the subject and are clearly oriented towards that recreation of Man to which the book invites us" (Saint-Exupéry. Œuvres complètes, Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1994, vol. I, p. 1009)

A precious extract from Terre des Hommes unpublished in the English version Wind, Sand and Stars - Saint-Exupéry's great humanist adventure and novel which brought him international renown. This rare folio riddled with erasures, rewrites, and corrections bears witness to the various stages of his writing process.