Book: The Tale of the Rose

«Every morning on the bridge, Ricardo Viñes, the pianist with hands like a dove's wings, would say in my ear, "Consuelo, you are not a woman."

I would laugh and kiss his cheeks, pushing back his long mustache that sometimes made me sneeze. He would then go through all the rituals of Spanish courtesy, wishing me a good morning, inquiring about my dreams, inviting me to enjoy this new day of our journey to Buenos Aires. And every day I wondered what Don Ricardo could possibly mean by his little morning greeting.

Am I an angel, then? An animal? Do I not exist?" I asked him fiercely at last.»

This is how "The Tale of the Rose" starts, a book written by Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry, wife of the famous author who inmortalized Consuelo as the Prince's beloved Rose in "Le Petit Prince": «Tu ne seras plus jamais une rose avec des épines mais la princesse de rêve qui attend toujours» said the little prince to the rose... you will never be a thorny rose but the princess of my dreams, who is always waiting.

Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry (1901-1979), née Suncín Sandoval, was born in Armenia, a small town in El Salvador. She was the daughter of wealthy parents, who spared no means in providing her with a good education abroad in the United States, Mexico and France. While in Paris, she met her first husband, Enrique Gómez Carrillo, an Argentinean consul in Paris, who died in 1927. She then moved to Buenos Aires with a group of French writers invited by the president of Argentina.

Meanwhile, Antoine had been building a successful aviation career, and he had become one of the pioneers of international postal flight, in the days when aircraft had few instruments. He worked with Aéropostale, Courrier du Sud, and while in Argentina, he worked with Aeropostal Argentina. Consuelo met Antoine at a party in the lounge of the Alliance Française in Buenos Aires, and very soon they began a torrid affair that followed with their marriage in Nice in 1931.

Their marriage was tempestuous... Antoine's constant absences and extramarital affairs made Consuelo explode in surrealistic scenes full of jelousy. She was naive, passionate, nervous and egotistical all at the same time, but the inconditional love she felt for her husband was undeniable. She recognized Antoine's weakness, a man who couldn't resist the adulation of other women, but she made him paid for every indiscretion with her temperamental spurts, and yet, Antoine admitted that he couldn't write without his wife's support and inspiration.

In 1943 Antoine wrote "Le Petit Prince", immortalizing Consuelo as the Prince's beloved Rose, too proud and thorny to admit her pain at his departure. A year later, the aviator disappeared over the Atlantic; and Consuelo, still devastated by her loss, wrote "The Tale of the Rose," as a memoir of the life she shared with Antoine. She sealed the manuscript away in a trunk at her home, which only came to light after her death in 1979.

Consuelo Suncín Sandoval, Comtesse Antoine de Saint Exupéry had a prestigious French name, but today her artistic personality deserves to be recognized. She was also a painter and a sculptor, and that legacy as well as her writings are full of the colours and the violence of that Salvadorean land she loved more than anything else.

I sometimes wonder how is it that we don't hear about love stories like this anymore. We're always so immersed in the daily routine of going to work, making money, paying the mortgage, and planning for the future. I feel we're more like denying a future for ourselves... by living the life everyone is living with no possibilities of shining or failing. Maybe by allowing us to fail we can shine after... just as Consuelo did. She was twice a widow, always refusing to settle, and yet so many years after her death, she's getting the recognition as the great woman who loved a famous writer.

Biographical notes taken from the Mme de Saint-Exupéry's official site.