# Antoine de Saint-Exupéry



## VirginiaHuguenot (May 3, 2007)

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was a famous French World War II aviator and writer. His most famous book is _The Little Prince_, which I read as a child, along with millions of others. Saint-Exupéry disappeared in 1944 while flying on a mission over the Mediterrean Sea. His body was never found, but his bracelet was found by a fisherman in 1998, and his plane was discovered in 2000 in the waters off Marseille. 

For what it's worth, I recently learned that he happened to be friends with Leon Wencelius, a professor at Swarthmore, who wrote on John Calvin and the arts. Wencelius, in fact, published an annotated French edition of _The Little Prince_.


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## LadyCalvinist (May 3, 2007)

I too read and loved the Little Prince as a child. Interesting to hear about his friendship, could Saint-Exupery have been a Christian?


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## VirginiaHuguenot (May 3, 2007)

LadyCalvinist said:


> I too read and loved the Little Prince as a child. Interesting to hear about his friendship, could Saint-Exupery have been a Christian?



I was wondering that myself -- good question!


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## VictorBravo (May 3, 2007)

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is generally considered an Existentialist writer, along with Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre and others. 

Even so, I've read much of what he has written: _Vol de Nuit _(Night Flight), _Terre des Hommes _(known as Wind, Sand, and Stars in English), _Courrier Sud_, and _Le Petit Prince_. He mixed romance with hard pragmatism in his inimitable French manner. 

I have been smitten hard by his writing and have to admit that he heavily influenced my worldview. He taught me to think poeticly and critically simultaneously. His hard and admiring depiction of a pilot friend who crashed in the Andes and crawled out of the mountains, over snow banks and down cliffs, so that someone could find his body (in those days, a wife could not collect life insurance if her husband's body was not found) brought me to tears. (The friend survived). And his description of the pioneering of aviation is without parrallel. I became a pilot because of him. 

But I can't say he was a Christian. If so, it doesn't show in his works.


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## VirginiaHuguenot (May 3, 2007)

Thanks for your insights, Vic. I think, from my meager knowledge of him, that he is hard to classify, but while there are many profound religious and philosophical themes in his writings, I too don't find direct statements from him that would lead me to think of him as a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ. 

In _Flight to Arras_, he says that while getting ready for his flight he felt "like a Christian abandoned by grace." His writings strike me as deep and powerful but, like _The Matrix_ or the writings of Rainer Maria Rilke, malleable to different religious points of view, including the Christian, depending on the viewer / reader. 

He was a remarkable thinker, adventurer, writer and person.


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## edb19 (May 4, 2007)

I've always thought that The Little Prince is one of the best children's books aout there.

edie


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