SAINT-EXUPÉRY Antoine de (1900-1944)

Autograph manuscript. [1938?]; 6 pages in-4 in black ink. Unpublished text, evocation of the oases, and reflection on the war, a passage of which will be reused in Terre des hommes. The manuscript presents some erasures and corrections. The writing is difficult to decipher, and the quotations we will give are sometimes conjectural. "I had landed in Morocco on the occasion of a trail. And I had stayed in Foued el Hassan and Goulimine, these pre-Saharan posts already oases with their palm groves, their running water and these washing machines which make the miracle of the oases. Suddenly the domain of men ceases in the white earth and the sand". He evokes the "steep roads of the Atlas, [...] those crevices in the cliffs where the sea begins. And already these reefs where the water becomes divine. "He left with his water bag. He thought he would reach the post... but the well he was counting on had dried up. He stopped about 2 kilometers away, and we found him coming back..." This atmosphere is already different from the Beauce. The Bohemian can, with his eyes closed, move and live. He lives in this great park of Europe"... Why does man not want to leave the cities? "He who lived by night in the desert, by a warm fire, and saw the stars slowly appearing towards the east... I had only to cross my memory to find her [...] This wind, this sand, these stars, and this sun. And installed there to preserve them, the man. [...] Walking from post to post, we find him tapping you on the shoulder and quenching your thirst, [...] in these oases among the palm trees and the whores [...] or if he travels in a caravan, perhaps carrying his junk from one village to another, but also his loves [...] and his regrets and his desires... Saint-Exupéry finds the man who "was our interpreter on the line, for years, towards Beirut. He is a kaid from somewhere"... Then he mentions Captain de Latour, who recounts an episode of the Rif war [this passage was taken up, with variations and without the name of the officer, in the article in Paris-Soir of October 4, 1938, "Il faut donner un sens à la vie des hommes" (We must give a meaning to men's lives), part of the report La Paix ou la Guerre? and integrated in chap. VIII of Terre des hommes (Pléiade, t. I, p. 277-278 and 356-357)]: the captain receives parliamentarians from a mountain tribe, when his post is attacked by another tribe; his hosts help him to repel the attack. "The next day it is their turn to attack Latour. But before the battle an emissary comes to him. /- Yesterday we defended you. We spent thirty rounds of ammunition on you. Give them back to us. /That's regular... /Latour gives them back, like a great lord, these bullets that are intended for him. [...] He told me this story. And he is silent and I am silent. And I know what he regrets. That nobility in human relations. [...] I could well ask him "justify your war to me?" He would answer me wrongly, because we have concepts. And that one has to justify oneself somehow. But in the end he won't believe it, nor will anyone else. That is my great truth about war"... And so on.