Growing up was the tragedy of Antoine de Saint-Exupery's life. Despite the death of his father when he was three years old, the writer and aviator always remembered summers at the family chateau at Saint-Maurice-de-Remens, 35 km north-east of Lyon, as an enchanted time whose magic could not be recaptured.
The Comtesse de Saint-Exupery and her five children wintered in the Lyon apartment where Antoine was born 100 years ago, at what is now number 8 rue Antoine de Saint-Exupery. "It's completely by chance I was born in Lyon, this city of beautiful silences," he later wrote. His parents were married at Saint-Maurice. His father Jean and his only brother Francois were buried there. His mother, Countess Marie, inherited the chateau from her great-aunt Gabrielle. During their annual April to October stays at Saint-Maurice, up to eight servants looked after the family. The village priest was a frequent dinner guest, and Mademoiselle Anne-Marie Poncet travelled once a week from Lyon to give the children piano and violin lessons.
Every Thursday, Marie de SaintExupery invited the village children to the chateau to join her own progeny in producing plays and concerts. Antoine began a life-long habit of waking up the chateau's inhabitants in the middle of the night to force them to listen to a poem or short story he had written. Saint-Ex wrote about life at Saint-Maurice in Pilote de Guerre (Flight to Arras), Courier Sud (Southern Mail) and Terre des Hommes (Wind, Sand and Stars).The character of The Little Prince - the best-selling book in the world after the Bible - resembles the writer as a child, with the mop of yellow hair for which his family nicknamed him "the sun king".
Today only the entry, with its limestone and black basalt chequered floor, and the massive carved oak china cabinet and dining-room table are as they were in Saint-Ex's childhood. The house was the adults' domain, the five and a half hectare garden and adjacent farm the childrens'. In her book, Five Children in a Garden, Antoine's older sister Simone recalled that "the garden offered a thousand treasures. We built tree houses and huts carpeted with moss; we raided the red currant bushes."
The chateau turns its back on the village, facing a vast meadow dotted with pine, linden and chesnut trees, the Bugey hills and the Jura mountains. The iron horse-heads on the stable doors, the doll-house aviary and the marble carving on the chapel door of two angels carrying Tante Gabrielle's six year-old daughter (who died of diptheria in 1875) to heaven are as they were when Saint-Ex was a child.
"I feel much closer to Saint-Ex in the garden," says Michel Richelmy, who founded the Centre Saint-Exupery in Lyon 50 years ago. "The family took the train from Lyon to Amberieu. A horse-drawn carriage picked them up at the station," Mr Richelmy says as we walk up the overgrown drive. "One of the childrens' favourite games was to run from the bottom of the garden to the chateau when a storm broke. The last child to be hit by rain drops became the `Chevalier Aklan'." In Flight to Arras, Saint-Ex compared the game to dodging German bullets in his reconnaissance plane.
In 1930 he wrote to his mother from Buenos Aires: "I cannot think of my corner of the world without a great hunger to be there; without clenching my fists amid these crowds, thinking of the smell of the linden trees at Saint-Maurice, of the scent of its cupboards, of your voice."
Financial difficulties forced the countess to sell the chateau two years later, but SaintEx always felt drawn to it. His nostalgia may have been fatal. One month before he was shot down by the Germans on July 31st 1944, he was scolded for straying from his itinerary to fly over places where he had grown up. Some historians believe he lengthened his last mission to fly over Saint-Maurice.
The partially restored chateau at Saint-Maurice-de-Remens will next be open to the public on September 16th and 17th of this month for the annual French heritage days. The grounds can be visited by arrangement with the caretaker. In Lyon, the apartment building where Saint-Exupery was born is marked by a plaque at 8 rue Saint-Exupery. A bronze and marble monument to the aviator stands one block away on the Place Bellecour
