Manuscrit inédit et variantes de "Lettre à un otage"

5 sheets on white glassine watermarked with “Esleeck Fidelity Onion Skin Made in USA,” black pen, foliation handwritten in black pen on the first page (1), subsequent foliation in purple pencil (0428-0432). Rust marks, several folds in the margins.
Several crossed-out sections, additions in the margins, corrections and erasures. Illegible sections.
The Smithsonian Institution (Archives of American Art) preserves the final typescript of Lettre à un otage (Letter to a Hostage), as well as the manuscript proofs that Saint-Exupéry entrusted to the famous expressionist painter Hedda Sterne on 16th April 1943, before leaving for Oran.
A precious handwritten first-draft of the Lettre à un otage manuscript, offering rewritings and previously unseen sections of this vibrant plea for man's friendship and respect during the dark period of the Occupation.
Saint-Exupéry also reveals the reason – unknown to biographers – as to why he was driven to publish this text separately to protect his best friend Léon Werth, to whom he dedicated Le Petit Prince, from the Nazi retaliation.
Our manuscript, written during his New York exile in 1942, plunges the reader into the years of turmoil that would follow the declaration of war, when Saint-Exupéry, the “unemployed soldier,” suffered from the inactivity that reigned over the French exiles in Manhattan. Lettre à un otage was originally intended to serve as a preface for Léon Werth's novel, Trente-trois jours, that Saint-Exupéry would publish from New York. The novel, vehemently anti-Nazi and written immediately after the French debacle of 1940, exposed Werth, who had Jewish origins, to the sanctions of the occupier. In the manuscript, Saint-Exupéry explains his decision to renounce his publication and publish the preface on its own in 1943, under the name “Lettre à un otage,” making his friend Werth, the incarnation of the French people held captive in their own country.
Our set of manuscript proofs lies between the preface to Werth's eventually abandoned novel and the final Lettre à un otage text. Whereas the first three leaves are variations of the published Lettre à un otage text, the fourth and fifth, both previously unpublished, seem to be addressed to the editors of “Brentano's Books,” Jacques Shiffrin and Robert Tenger, to whom Werth's novel was entrusted. The leaves shed a fascinating light on the little-known reasons that forced Saint-Exupéry to withdraw his preface: ”As for Léon Werth, the preface will have reinforced the point of view that I stated, it will confirm the danger of death. Werth's book is not currently in a position to serve as a defence for the French, and I prefer to avoid any sterile retaliation by not publishing its preface.” Aware of the risks for his friend who was still in France, Saint-Exupéry decided to separate himself from Werth's novel and strongly urges his editors to do the same: “Furthermore, it seems to me that Brentano's can only defer the publication of this book until the time when reading will have saved Werth from the danger of death.” In this leaf, Saint-Exupéry continues to state a further reason: ”Furthermore, my presence on the front line... will inevitably be circulated as propaganda. It will certainly attract trouble to those French people whom I hold so dearly.” This statement also shows his eagerness to return to fight, after long, sterile months amongst Manhattan's “false resistance.” Several months after writing these leaves he received his mobilisation orders and set off for the North African front in April 1943 to fight for his friend Léon Werth.
Saint-Exupéry met Werth in the 1920s at the Café des Deux-Magots through René Delange. Werth, who became a pacifist after the trenches, is also the author of a war-time literature masterpiece (Clavel soldat, 1919). An improbable friendship formed between the writer/pilot and the anarchist, whose arguments and ideas he appreciated precisely because they often differed from his own. After his demobilisation in June 1940, Saint-Exupéry visited Léon Werth in Saint-Amour in the unoccupied zone, in his wife's country house that was relatively protected from antisemitic attacks. Werth strongly encouraged him to leave for the United States, despite the writer's reticence, who felt that leaving France was a luxury reserved for a privileged few. Having successfully arrived in New York on 31 December thanks to his novel Wind, Sand and Stars that had won the National Book Award, Saint-Exupéry receives Werth's manuscript during 1941: ”A few months ago my friend Léon Werth sent a manuscript to the U.S., entitled 33 jours [33 days].”
This preface, which later became Lettre à un otage, expresses the indescribable suffering of a nation, which he compares – as Baudelaire or Hugo had done before him – to a ship that had embarked on a dark odyssey: ”Today, in the aftermath of total occupation, France, with her cargo, has entered the block in silence, like a ship with all her lights extinguished, so that no-one knows whether she has survived the perils of the sea or not, far from the one I needed to exist, begins to haunt my memory.” The exiled writer feels the thin thread that ties him to his family and his country fading away: ”I feel threatened in my essence by the fragility of my friends. The one who is fifty years old, he is ill and he is a Jew. So perhaps he is more threatened than any other by the German winter [...]. Only then can I imagine that he is alive. Only then, wandering far away in the empire of his friendship, which knows no bounds, am I allowed to feel not an immigrant, but a traveler”.
We encounter themes that were dear to Saint-Exupéry, written at the same time in Le Petit Prince, and in particular in his dedication to Werth, close to the description of his friend given in the manuscript: “[...]this great person is the best friend I have in the world. [...] [She] lives in France where she is hungry and cold. She needs to be comforted [...]." In addition, the first two leaves are shining examples of Saint-Exupéry's method of composition, which consisted of writing a series of parallel texts in which he tried to express a similar idea in as many different ways as possible. Here we find two rewritings of the future chapter V of Lettre à un otage, which was finally published in 1943, questioning the future after the collapse of the known world:
First leaf: ”How to safeguard access to this mysterious communication through which men communicate at a meeting place that is common to them all? The fracturing of the modern world has challenged all thought systems. There is no obvious or universal formula [...].”
Second leaf: ”How to safeguard access to this mysterious homeland? The fracturing of the modern world draws us into a dark time where there are no longer any obvious or universal formulas. The problems are incoherent, the solutions irreconcilable. The different conciliations do not satisfy. Yesterday's truth is dead. Today's is yet to be created and each one holds only a portion of the truth [...].”
Final published version: (Lettre à un otage, 1943) “The fracturing of the modern world has mired us in the shadows. The problems are incoherent, the solutions contradictory. Yesterday's truth is dead, tomorrow's is yet to be created. No feasible conciliation can be found, and we each possess just a portion of the truth. Lacking the evidence to guide them, political religions invoke violence. So then, by disagreeing over methodologies, we are in danger of forgetting that we are all chasing the same goal.”
Lettre à un otage, published in New York in June 1943, was the last work ever published during Saint-Exupéry's lifetime, just one year before his disappearance aboard his Lightening.
An important manuscript of a text that elevated its author to a position of national importance, and which constituted a poignant eulogy of Saint-Exupéry's friendship with occupied France. A tribute to his friend Léon Werth, to whom his last masterpiece, Le Petit Prince, was dedicated: “à Léon Werth, [...] le meilleur ami que j'ai au monde,” “To Léon Werth, [...] the best friend I have in the world”.