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 IN
THE SPRING OF 1944, Antoine de Saint Exupéry left his wife,
Consuelo, to return to the war in Europe. Soon
after, he disappeared while flying a reconnaissance mission over
occupied France. Neither his plane nor his body was ever found.
The Tole of the Rose is Consuelo's account of their
extraordinary marriage. It is a love story about a pilot and his
wife, a man who yearned for the stars and the spirited woman who
gave him the strength to fulfill his dreams.
Consuelo Suncin Sandoval de Gomez
and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry met in Buenos
Aires in 1930-she a seductive young widow, he a brave pioneer of
early aviation, decorated for his acts of heroism in the deserts
of North Africa. He was large in his passions, a fierce loner with
a childlike appetite for danger. She was frail and voluble, exotic
and capricious. Within hours of their first encounter, he knew he
would have her as his wife.
Their love affair and marriage would take
them from Buenos Aires to Paris to Casablanca to New York.
It would take them through periods of betrayal and infidelity,
pain and intense passion, devastating abandonment and tender,
poetic love. Several times in the course of their marriage
they would go their separate ways, but always they would return.
The Tale of the Rose is the story of a man of extravagant
dreams, and of the woman who was his muse, the inspiration
for the Little Prince's beloved rose unique in all the world-whom
he could not live with and could not live without.
Written on Long Island in a quiet spell of
reconciliation, The Little Prince was Antoine's greatest gift
to the woman he never stopped loving, the only child to emerge
from their union. Îhe Îale of the Rose is Consuelo's replythe
love letter she never could write to her husband-a fable of
its own, just as magical, poetic, and tragic as Ïhe Little
Prince.
CONSUELO DE SAINT EXUPÉRY wrote Tale of the
Rose in 1945. She died in 1979, thirty-five years after her
husband, never having published her story. The manuscript,
sealed away in a trunk, was discovered in 1999 by an academic
doing research for a new biography of her husband. A number
one bestseller, its publication in France was a national sensation.
It has been translated into sixteen languages.
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