Un feuillet manuscrit autographe de "Terre des Hommes" : « Nous étions les branches d'un même arbre »

Original autograph manuscript by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, one page written in black ink on a leaf of white paper, several crossings out, corrections and re-writings.

Remarkable working manuscript for one of the most beautiful passages in Wind, Sand and Stars.

Emblematic page of Saint-Exupéry's great humanist and romantic adventure, which celebrates the fortuitous union of beings constrained by the elements and by history. Magnificent example of the writer-aviator's narrative dialogues, mixing his memories of the Spanish war and his rough landings with Henri Guillaumet in the Sahara, pondering the bonds of camaraderie, “this unity that no longer needs language”, that speak for themselves when on the brink of death together.

The leaf, testimony of the writing process of this text, presents several crossed out passages different to the published text, in the final chapter of Wind, Sand and Stars (chapter 8 “Les Hommes”), following the account of his famous accident in Libya and his rescue by the Tuaregs.

In this passage between adventure story and meditation, the desert nights are accompanied by a portrait from his stay in the heart of “bloody Spain”: the writer addresses a sergeant he met on the Madrid front, “little accountant somewhere in Barcelona”, waking up from a final assault that will surely cost him his life. This largely crossed out passage highlights Saint-Exupéry's intense questioning of the power of this unfailing commitment, beyond that of life and death, that he himself had experienced in the heart of the western Sahara: “What did you find here, Sergeant, that brought you the feeling of no longer betraying your destiny? Perhaps that brotherly arm that lifted your sleepy head, perhaps that tender smile that did not pity, but shared? [...] we experienced this union when we crossed, in teams of two planes, a still disobedient Rio de Oro”. The life of this anonymous fighter, a symbol of universality, is crossed with his own memories of a chaotic expedition in the Mauritanian desert “in 1926” – the date was not retained in the final text: “At that moment we discover this unity that did not need language. I understood your leaving. If you were poor in Barcelona, alone perhaps after work, if your body itself was no refuge, here you felt the feeling of accomplishing yourself.”

Without naming him, Saint-Exupéry refers here to Henri Guillaumet, this aviation giant and bad-tempered mentor with whom he flies in tandem to deliver mail to Dakar: “But there is an altitude of relations where gratitude and pity lose their meaning. It is there that one breathes like a freed prisoner. [...] I have never heard the shipwrecked man thank his rescuer. Most often, even, during the exhausting transfer from one plane to another, we insulted ourselves with mail bags: 'Bastard! If I breakdown, it's your fault, with your fervour to fly two miles, in the middle of the cross currents! If you had followed me further down, we would already be in Port-Étienne!' and the other who offered his life found himself ashamed to be a bastard. What else would we have thanked him for? He also had a right to our life.”

Confronting experiences separated by time and space, the humanist pen of Saint-Exupéry writes this manuscript that is both a philosophical essay and an adventure novel that culminates in this last metaphor “We were branches of the same tree”.

Between the writer's worked and re-worked lines, a real poetry emerges of man's sacrifice for an ideal of humanity that surpasses and unites. Sartre praised the existentialist achievement of Exupérian writing, of which this manuscript is the perfect example: “Against the subjectivity and the quietism of our predecessors, he was able to sketch the main features of a literature of work and tools. [...] he is the precursor to a literature of construction that tends to replace consumer literature” (Situations II, p. 326).

Superb handwritten page with dense and nervous writing, of one of the greatest humanist texts of the 20th century.