Courrier sud

[Southern Carrier]
New edition. Spine very discreetly restored, a few fold marks on the front cover.

Exceptional copy signed and inscribed by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: “Pour Jean Lucas. Avec toute ma vraie amitié cimentée par le sable (l'astuce est mauvaise mais le cœur y est). En souvenir des belles orgies de Port Étienne.” (“For Jean Lucas. With all my true friendship cemented by sand [the joke is poor but the heart is there]. In memory of the beautiful orgies of Port Étienne” [with a drawing of a naked girl].

Saint-Exupéry inscribed this copy of his first book to Jean Lucas, a fellow pilot at Aéropostale, who prepared with him in 1935 his famous Paris-Saigon raid where he famously crashed “in the center of the desert” of Libya. His accident as well as the stopovers in Port Etienne with Lucas will be told in his masterpiece Wind, Sand, and Stars. Lucas will celebrate at his side the great literary success of this last novel (winner Grand Prix of the French Academy) at Consuelo's flat in Paris, with writer Léon-Paul Fargue and the Werth couple.
In this long and humorous inscription, the writer evokes moments spent in 1931 in Port-Étienne, now Nouadhibou in Mauritania, where “Night and day, Lucas, who was chief of the airport, would wind his gramophone; and Ravel's Bolero, flung up here so far out of the path of life, would speak to us in a half-lost language, provoking an aimless melancholy which curiously resembled thirst” (Wind, Sand, and Stars). In this refuge where “the threats [is]deadened by so much sand” a fraternity itself “cemented by the sand” was born between these pioneers of aviation. Braving all imaginable dangers, Saint-Exupéry flew mail from France to Casablanca in a Laté 26. He recalls here his stopovers, the “lavish orgies of Port-Étienne” in the burning solitude of these remote lands: “Located on the edge of unsettled territories, Port-Etienne is not a city. There is a fort, a hangar and a wooden hut for the crews of our country” he writes in Wind, Sand, and Stars. In the company of Lucas and the captain-governor, he kills boredom with chess games, conjuring tricks, naval battles, games of hangman, long stories of flights and girls, as the explicit ink drawing at the bottom of the page seems to attest... many “crazy” evenings of which this letter and this drawing preserve the memory.
One night in July 1939, Lucas cured him of his “blank page syndrome” by locking him in his room so that he could finish his preface to the book by aviator Anne Morrow Lindbergh. At the end of the war, the inconsolable Léon Werth, to whom Saint-Exupéry dedicated The Little Prince, wrote to Jean Lucas: “The armistice without Tonio is not quite the armistice”.

An exceptional gesture of friendship from the “Lord of the Sands” to his faithful brother in arms. Jean Lucas portrayed in Wind, Sand, and Stars was one of the rare intimates the writer confided in (Saint Exupéry, Une vie à contre courant, p. 264).