Antoine Marie Jean-Baptiste Roger de Saint-Exupéry, born on 29 June 1900 in Lyon and disappeared in flight on July 31, 1944 at sea, off Marseille, Mort pour la France, is a French writer, poet, aviator and reporter.
Born into a family descended from the French nobility, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry spent a happy childhood despite the premature death of his father. A not very brilliant student, he nevertheless obtained his baccalaureate in 1917 and, after his failure at the Naval Academy, he turned to the fine arts and architecture. Became a pilot during his military service in 1921 in Strasbourg, he was hired in 1926 by the company Latécoère (future Aéropostale) and transported the mail from Toulouse to Senegal before joining South America in 1929. At the same time he published, in s inspired by his experiences as an aviator, his first novels:Courrier sud in 1929 and especially Night flight in 1931, which met with great success.
From 1932, his employer entered a difficult period. Saint-Exupéry also devoted himself to writing and journalism. He undertook extensive reporting in Vietnam in 1934, in Moscow in 1935, in Spain in 1936, which would feed his reflection on the humanist values he developed in Terre des hommes, published in 1939.
In 1939, he served in the Air Force where he was assigned to an aerial reconnaissance squadron. At the armistice, he left France for New York with the aim of bringing the Americans into the war and became one of the voices of the Resistance. Dreaming of action, he finally joined, in the spring of 1944, in Sardinia then in Corsica, a unit in charge of photographic reconnaissance for the landing in Provence. He disappeared at sea with his plane aP-38 Lightning F5B during his mission on July 31, 1944. His plane was not found until 2000 off the coast of Marseille.
The Little Prince, written in New York during the war, was published with his own watercolors in 1943 in New York and in 1946 by Gallimard, in France. This tale full of charm and humanity quickly became a huge worldwide success.
Youth and formation
Son of Count Jean-Marc de Saint-Exupéry (1863-1904), insurance inspector, and Marie Boyer de Fonscolombe, Saint-Exupéry was born on June 29, 1900 in the 2nd arrondissement of Lyon into a family descended from the French nobility. . He shares a happy childhood between five brothers and sisters. But in 1904, her father died, struck down by a cerebral hemorrhage at only 41 years old, at Foux station, leaving Marie de Saint-Exupéry to educate her five children alone:Marie-Madeleine, known as "Biche", Simone, known as "Monot". , Antoine, known as “Tonio”, François and Gabrielle, known as “Didi”.
Antoine's mother lives more or less well this premature widowhood, but her optimistic nature allows her to meet her obligations. Sensitive on edge, she forged privileged ties with Antoine and offered him an excellent education, something difficult at the time for a single woman. She transmits to her adored son values that he will keep all his life:honesty, respect for others, no social exclusivity. An exceptional woman, she devoted her life to her children, with a humanism that Saint-Exupéry cultivated throughout his travels.
Until the age of ten, he spent his childhood between the castle of La Môle in the Var, property of his maternal grandmother, and the castle of Saint-Maurice-de-Rémens in Ain, property of one of his aunts. At the end of the summer of 1909, his family moved to Le Mans, the region of origin of his father. Antoine entered Notre-Dame de Sainte-Croix College on October 7th. Attracted by elsewhere, the distant, adventure, he has sought since childhood to escape the limits of his aristocratic environment.
In 1912, he spent summer vacation in Saint-Maurice-de-Rémens. Fascinated by airplanes, he often cycled to the aerodrome of Ambérieu-en-Bugey, located a few kilometers away, and stayed there for hours questioning the mechanics on how airplanes worked. One day, he speaks to the pilot Gabriel Salvez claiming that his mother authorized him to perform a first flight. He therefore made his baptism on a Berthaud-Wroblewski2, an airplane manufactured in Villeurbanne by the Lyon industrialist Berthaud on plans by Pierre and Gabriel Wroblewski-Salvez. He writes a poem testifying to his new passion for airplanes:
The wings quivered under the breath of the evening
The engine of its song rocked the sleeping soul
The sun brushed against us with its pale color.
Saint-Exupéry thus spent almost all of his childhood in the family castle, surrounded by his brothers and sisters. He will remember this period as that of paradise lost:"The most beautiful moments of my life", he will say later
On the other hand, he does not like Saint College much - Cross of Le Mans where he is a boarder. His comrades, who nicknamed him Tatane, however collaborated in the class newspaper created on his initiative, which was then banned by the Fathers
When the First World War broke out, Marie de Saint-Exupéry was appointed head nurse of the military hospital of Ambérieu-en-Bugey in Ain. Thanks to her work, she can bring her children near her. His two sons, Antoine and François, joined the renowned Jesuit college of Notre-Dame de Mongré, in Villefranche-sur-Saône, as interns. The young Antoine can therefore finally devote himself to writing, with brio, since, even if his studies are otherwise mediocre, he wins the high school narration prize for one of his essays.
At the start of the school year in 1915, Marie de Saint-Exupéry, still stationed in Ambérieu-en-Bugey, felt that her sons did not really like the Jesuit fathers of Mongré. Anxious to protect her children and give them an education that would allow them to develop their gifts, she preferred to enroll them with the Marianist Brothers of Villa Saint-Jean in Fribourg, Switzerland. In close connection with the Stanislas College in Paris, this college has developed a modern educational method that allows them to exercise their creativity. Antoine finds there Louis de Bonnevie, whose family is neighbor and friend of his in Lyon. He established a deep and lasting friendship with him as well as with Marc Sabran and Charles Sallès.
In 1917, he obtained his baccalaureate despite poor academic results. The Saint-Exupéry student is more at ease in scientific subjects than in literature. During the summer, suffering from articular rheumatism3, François, Antoine's younger brother, playmate and confidant, died of pericarditis. Saddened by the death of his brother, Saint-Exupéry will experience this event as the passage from his life as a teenager to that of an adult.
War also inspires him. He makes caricatures of Prussian soldiers and their spiked helmets, the Emperor and the Kronprinz. He also writes a few poems:
Sometimes confusedly under a moonbeam,
A soldier stands out leaning on the clear water;
He dreams of his love, he dreams of his twenties!
Spring of War
In 1919, he failed the competitive examination for the Naval School (his results in the scientific branches were very good, but those of the literary branches insufficient) and enrolled as a free auditor in the architecture section at the École Nationale Supérieure. the fine Arts. Her mother helps her as best she can, despite her money worries. Antoine then benefits from the hospitality of his cousin Yvonne de Lestrange and also accepts several small jobs:with his friend Henry de Ségogne, he will notably be an extra for several weeks in Quo Vadis, an opera by Jean Noguès. In 1918, he had met Louise de Vilmorin, who inspired him with romantic poems.
I remember you as a bright home
Near whom I lived for hours, without saying a word
Like old hunters tired of the great outdoors
Who poke while their white dog breathes.
To my friend
However, during this period, his intense poetic activity inspired him with rather melancholy poems [ref. necessary], sonnets and suites of quatrains (Veillée, 1921) showing that he was going through a difficult period, because he found himself without a life plan and without a future perspective. Some of his poems are calligraphic and illuminated with India ink drawings. He offers two of his poetry notebooks to his friend Jean Doat.
In aviation
Strasbourg building where Antoine de Saint-Exupéry lived in 1921.
Commemorative monument in Tarfaya, Aéropostale stopover.
In April 1921, he was assigned for his military service as a mechanic in the 2nd Strasbourg aviation regiment. In June, he took flying lessons at his own expense. On July 9, his instructor let him go for a lap. Alone at the controls of his training plane, he is too high for landing. Going over the throttle too abruptly, it causes the carburetor to kick back. Believing that the engine had caught fire, he did not panic, did a second lap and landed in style. His instructor validates his training. Nevertheless, he leaves the memory of a sometimes distracted aviator, sometimes forgetting to retract his landing gear, sometimes to connect his on-board instruments, getting lost in the immensity of the sky7. The nickname "Pique la Lune" has stuck with him, not only because of his trumpet nose but also a certain tendency to withdraw into his inner world.
In January 1922, he was in Istres as a reserve cadet. He was received as a military pilot and promoted to corporal. In April 1922, as part of his training in the EOR, he took training courses in Avord, which he left for the Paris region with the rank of second lieutenant. At the beginning of August, he was assigned to the 37th aviation regiment in Casablanca, where he obtained his civil certificate. In his spare time, he makes sketches of his roommates in charcoal pencil and turquoise ink. His drawings are grouped together in his notebook Les Copains. In October, second lieutenant in the reserve, he chose his assignment to the 34th aviation regiment, at Le Bourget. In the spring of 1923, he had his first plane accident at Le Bourget:a fractured skull. After this serious accident, he was demobilized. However, he still plans to enter the Air Force, as General Barès encourages him to do. But the family of Louise de Vilmorin, his fiancée, opposes it. A long period of boredom began for him:he found himself in an office as a manufacturing controller at the Comptoir de Tuilerie, a subsidiary of the Société Générale d'Entreprise. In September, the engagement with Louise broke off.
In 1924, Saint-Exupéry worked in Allier and Creuse as a representative of the Saurer factory which manufactured trucks (he only sold one in a year and a half!). He gets tired and resigns. In 1924, he also began a work in prose, Manon, danseuse. In 1925, his poem entitled La Lune shows a far-fetched inspiration. We can also cite the poetic suite L'Adieu:
It's midnight — I'm walking
And I hesitate scandalized
Who is this pale chimpanzee
Who is dancing in this fountain?
The Moon, 1925
In 1926, he was hired by Didier Daurat, director of line operations for the Latécoère company (future Aéropostale) and joined Toulouse-Montaudran airport to transport mail on flights between Toulouse and Dakar. He then wrote a short story ("The escape of Jacques Bernis"), from which "The Aviator" would be taken, published in Adrienne Monnier's magazine, Le Navire d'argent (April issue), where his friend worked Jean Prevost. In Toulouse, he met Jean Mermoz and Henri Guillaumet. After two months, he is in charge of his first mail delivery to Alicante.
At the end of 1927, he was appointed station manager at Cap Juby in Morocco with the mission of improving the company's relations with the Moorish dissidents on the one hand and with the Spaniards on the other. There he will discover the burning solitude and the magic of the desert. In 1929, he published his first novel, Courrier sud, with Gallimard, in which he recounts his life and his emotions as a pilot.
In September 1929, he joined Mermoz and Guillaumet in South America to contribute to the development of Aéropostale as far as Patagonia. In 1930, he used the library of his friend Paul Dony to produce various sonnets inspired by other poets but which were all exercises in poetic virtuosity. In 1931, he published his second novel, Vol de nuit, a huge success, in which he evokes his years in Argentina and the development of lines to Patagonia. In 1931, still, he married in Agay with Consuelo Suncin Sandoval de Gómez (deceased in 1979), both Salvadoran writer and artist.
From 1932, when the company, undermined by politics, did not survive its integration into Air France, he barely survived, devoting himself to writing and journalism. Saint-Exupéry remains test pilot and raid pilot at the same time as he becomes a journalist for major reports.
Reporter for Paris-Soir, he traveled to Vietnam in 1934 and to Moscow in 1935. On December 29, 1935, accompanied by his mechanic Prévot, he attempted a Paris-Saigon raid aboard a Caudron-Renault Simoun, to beat the André Japy's record, who a few days earlier linked Paris to Saigon in 3 days and 15 hours. On the night of December 31, he was forced to land his plane in disaster in the Libyan desert in Egypt. He then experiences four days of wandering without water or food before an unexpected rescue. The 58-page manuscript of his adventure was sold at auction in 2009.
In 1936, he was sent as a reporter to Spain to cover the civil war. Because he refuses to adopt a basely partisan conception of journalism, unlike all the intellectuals of his time, he decides to reveal the abuses of the Spanish Republicans. From all these trips, he accumulates a very large sum of memories, emotions and experiences, which serve to feed his reflection on the meaning to be given to the human condition. His reflection led to the writing of Terre des hommes, which was published in 1939. The work was awarded the prize of the French Academy. It is in this novel that we find the famous sentence uttered by Henri Guillaumet after his accident in the Andes:"What I did, I swear to you, no animal would ever have done it".
War of 1939-1945
In 1939, he served in the Air Force where he was assigned to an aerial reconnaissance squadron. On May 23, 1940, he flew over Arras as German panzers invaded the city:although his Bloch 174 plane was riddled with bullets by the German DCA, he managed to return to base with his passengers safe and sound, which earned him to be rewarded with the Croix de guerre with palm and cited in the order of the Air Force, on June 2, 1940. This feat will inspire him with the title and plot of Pilote de guerre8. At the armistice, he left France for New York with the aim of bringing the Americans into the war. Considered by some to be a Pétainist because he was not a Gaullist, Saint-Exupéry struggled to make his voice heard. Like the vast majority of French people, he was initially rather favorable to Vichy, which seemed to him to represent the continuity of the state, and was therefore rather suspicious of General de Gaulle.
In fact , he especially tried to reconcile the opposing factions; during his radio call of November 29, 1942 from New York, i.e. three weeks after the Allied landings in North Africa, he launched:"French people, let's reconcile to serve", but he was misunderstood, because it was too late and the time was that of the general confrontation. However, according to recently opened American archives, it seems that the American secret services had considered pushing him instead of General de Gaulle.
In May 1942, he stayed in Canada with the De Koninck family, rue Sainte-Geneviève, in old Quebec. While his stay was supposed to last a few days, he finally spent almost five weeks in Quebec because of visa problems. With the mission of bringing the Americans into the war, he published Pilote de guerre in New York in February 1942 to remind the Americans how hard the battle of France had been, before publishing a year later the poetic and philosophical tale Le Petit Prince.
But he only thinks of getting involved in the action, considering, as was the case with Aéropostale, that only those who take part in the events are legitimate to testify to them. In April 1943, although considered by the Allies as an outdated pilot, unable to fly a modern combat aircraft, he resumed active service in the air force in Tunisia thanks to his connections and pressure from the French command.
Relegated from hunting, he carried out some reconnaissance missions, but he was the victim of several incidents which put him "in command reserve", given his age, his poor general state of health, his various crashes previous ones. He then stayed in Algeria, in Morocco, then in Algeria again, where in the spring of 1944 he obtained authorization from the commander-in-chief of the air forces in the Mediterranean, the American general Eaker, to join the prestigious 2/33 group based in Alghero. , in Sardinia. It made several flights, punctuated by breakdowns and incidents.
On July 17, 1944, the 2/33 moved to Borgo, not far from Bastia, in Corsica. It is from the nearby airport of Poretta that he takes off at the controls of his F-5B-1-LO, photo version of the twin-engine P-38 Lightning, on July 31 at 8:25 am, for a mapping mission (heading for the Rhône Valley, heading for Annecy and return via Provence):photographic reconnaissance in order to draw precise maps of the country, very useful for the very next landing in Provence, scheduled for August 15. He is alone on board, his plane is unarmed and takes with him fuel for six hours of flight. At 8:30 a.m., the last radar echo was reported. His plane would have crashed not far from the coast of Provence. It is therefore impossible to carry out field research in times of war. "Saint-Ex" is officially missing. His memory was solemnly celebrated in Strasbourg on July 31, 1945. In 1948, he was recognized as "Dead for France".
The mystery of his death
On March 12, 1950, in the Official Journal, Commander Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was cited at the order of the Air Force posthumously, for having "proved, in 1940 as in 1943, his passion for service and his faith in the destiny of the fatherland", and "found a glorious death, on July 31, 1944, on his return from a distant reconnaissance mission on his country occupied by the enemy".
If death was no longer in doubt, the circumstances remained to be elucidated. In 1950, a pastor from Aachen, a former intelligence officer in the Luftwaffe, testified that he had learned, on July 31, 1944, that a P-38 Lightning had been shot down in the Mediterranean by a German Focke-Wulf. Then, in 1972, came the posthumous testimony of a young German officer, Midshipman Robert Heichele, who allegedly fired on the Lightning from his plane, a Focke-Wulf 190, around noon, above Castellane. But Heichele was in turn shot down in August 1944. In the 1990s, another testimony emerged late, about a resident of Carqueiranne who would have seen, on the fateful day, the Lightning being shot down. The sea would then have rejected the body of a soldier on the beach, which would have been buried anonymously in the cemetery of the commune. Was it Saint-Exupéry? To find out, it would be necessary to exhume the body, to carry out comparisons with the DNA of the members of his family, who are opposed to it. Each time, these "revelations" revived the interest of both specialists and the general public, for the "Saint-Ex mystery". Finally, in 2000, pieces of his aircraft, the landing gear, a piece of propeller, parts of the cabin and especially the chassis, were found in the Mediterranean off the coast of Marseille. On September 7, 1998, a fisherman had already found his bracelet in his trawl, near the island of Riou. Brought to the surface in September 2003, the remains of the plane were formally identified on April 7, 2004 thanks to the serial number of the aircraft. The remains of the Lightning are on display at the Air and Space Museum in Le Bourget, in a space dedicated to the aviator writer.
But nothing allowed to give a definitive conclusion on the circumstances of his death, despite the computer simulation of the accident - from the deformed parts - which showed a dive, almost vertical and at high speed, in the water. Was it the consequence of yet another technical failure, of the pilot's discomfort? Some even put forward, to the great scandal of those close to him, the hypothesis of the suicide of a physically diminished Saint-Exupéry (he could not close the canopy of his camera alone), desperate for the world he saw coming, a thesis supported by some of his last writings, in a frankly pessimistic tone, for example the last lines of a letter addressed to Pierre Dalloz, written the day before his death:“If I got off, I will regret absolutely nothing. The future termite mound terrifies me. And I hate their virtue as robots. I was made to be a gardener. »
In March 2008, a former Luftwaffe pilot, on a Messerschmitt Bf 109, Horst Rippert (born in 1922), claimed in the newspaper La Provence to have shot down a P-38 lightning aircraft on July 31, 1944 in the area where Saint-Exupéry. On a mission to find an enemy plane flying over the Annecy region, Horst Rippert circled for several minutes above the Mediterranean without spotting anything. Suddenly, an allied plane passed him, 3,000 meters below him. Horst Rippert shot and hit. The plane burst into flames and crashed into the Mediterranean. Saint-Exupéry was reported missing that day, giving rise to the mystery of his disappearance. “If I had known who was sitting on the plane, I would not have fired. Not on this man. said Horst Rippert, who admired the writer. Thesis, however, undermined by many inconsistencies. After the war Horst Rippert, brother of Ivan Rebroff (who died in February 2008, shortly before this revelation), converted to journalism and headed the sports department of the ZDF.
His works
If they are not entirely autobiographical, his works are largely inspired by his life as an airmail pilot, except for The Little Prince (1943) - undoubtedly his most popular success (it has since sold more than 134 million copies in the world, and is therefore the second best-selling work in the world after the Bible) - which is rather a poetic and philosophical tale.
He wrote other equally well-known books:Courrier Sud (1929), Vol de nuit (1931), Terre des hommes (1939), Pilote de guerre (1942), Letter to a hostage (1944), War writings (collected in 1982), and Citadelle (posthumous, 1948). All of his novels told the story of his travels in fiction and fantasy.
The Aviator
Published in 1926. The first edited text by Saint-Exupéry, a fragment it seems of a larger whole, and which will serve as material for Courrier sud.
South Mail
Published in 1929. Through the character of Jacques Bernis, Saint-Exupéry recounts his own life and his own emotions as a pilot. Louise de Vilmorin is encamped in the character of Geneviève.
Night Flight
Published in December 1931. This work, which reaches the counting of tragedy, is prefaced by his friend André Gide, won the Prix Femina for Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and consecrated him as a man of letters. It was a huge success that gave rise to multiple translations. Its film adaptation was even sold to Hollywood.
The main character, Rivière, is inspired by its chef Didier Daurat. It gives life to a leader who knows how to push his men to their limits to carry out their mission:the mail must pass at all costs, the mission exceeds in value human life. The values that the novel conveys are:primacy of the mission, importance of duty and responsibility for the task to be accomplished until sacrifice.
Land of men
Published in December 1939, it won the Grand Prix du roman from the French Academy. It is a series of stories, testimonies and meditations based on the sum of experiences, emotions and memories he has accumulated during his many travels. It is also a tribute to friendship and to his friends Mermoz and Guillaumet and more broadly a romantic vision of the nobility of humanism.
War Pilot
Published in 1942.
The Little Prince
Written at Eaton's Neck (Northport, USA) and published in 1943 in New York by Reynal &Hitchcock in two versions (English and French). It will not be published in French until 1946 in France, two years after his death. For technical reasons, the "author's watercolors" reproduced in the French versions that followed were only reframes of the American edition, which led to a significant loss of quality. In addition, some drawings had been modified in a minor way. The Gallimard edition published in 1999 seems to be the first to provide illustrations consistent with the original edition, of much better technical and artistic quality despite a smaller format (printing techniques have also made progress since 1943).
Letter to a Hostage
Published in 1944.
Citadel
Published in 1948. Begun in 1936, this work was not completed by Saint-Exupéry. Published in a first version in 1948 from a typed text, it did not include all of the author's thoughts. All the manuscripts were made available to publishers in 1958 and made it possible to better marry his intentions. “Citadelle is not a finished work. In the mind of the author it had to be pruned and reworked according to a rigorous plan which, in the current state, is difficult to reconstruct. The author has often taken up the same themes, either to express them with more precision, or to illuminate them with one of his images of which he has the secret” (Simone de Saint-Exupéry).
Youth letters (1923-1931)
Published in 1953. New edition in 1976 under the title Letters of Youth to the Invented Friend.
Notebooks
Published in 1953. Complete edition in 1975. Set of notes kept from 1935 to 1940 on a diary and five notebooks. Very eclectic, it reflects the writer's interests and curiosities for science, religion, literature and gives rise to relevant reflections and aphorisms.
Letters to his mother
Published in 1955. Collection of Saint-Exupéry's correspondence with his mother covering the period 1910 - 1944.
War writings (1939-1944)
Published in 1982. This posthumous collection is prefaced by Raymond Aron.
Manon, dancer
Published in 2007. Short novel completed in 1925. It is the love story between a “chicken”, Manon, and a forty year old man, “serious”, sad, who is looking for meaning in his life. As soon as they meet, a romantic relationship develops between them, the man tenderly protecting his "poor little girl", whom he believes to be a dancer. They make love without passion. Go on a trip by car. But he learns one day from three of his clients that Manon is in fact a prostitute. They break up and then meet again. Manon throws herself under the wheels of a truck and nearly dies. She will remain lame.
Letters to the unknown
Collection of love letters to a young Red Cross paramedic met in May 1943 on a train between Oran and Algiers. These letters are decorated with drawings of the Little Prince that Saint-Exupéry makes speak in his place. They were brought to light in November 2007 during a public sale, and published by Gallimard in September 2008 in the form of facsimiles accompanied by transcriptions.
Circumstantial writings
"Peace or War" (1938 for Paris-Soir)
"Moscow" (1935 for Paris-Soir)
"Bloody Spain" (August 1936 for L'Intransigeant)
“The Broken Flight. Prison de sable” (January-February 1936 for L’Intransigeant)
“Madrid” (July 1937 for Paris-Soir)
Cinema
Original screenplay for Anne-Marie, French film directed by Raymond Bernard, released in 1936.
Anecdotes
The sections “Anecdotes”, “Other details”, “Did you know? », « Citations », etc., peuvent être inopportunes dans les articles.
Pour améliorer cet article il convient, si ces faits présentent un intérêt encyclopédique et sont correctement sourcés, de les intégrer dans d’autres sections.
Il avait multiplié les défis, comme l’aviation, cultivé les amitiés les plus improbables et tenté d’apprivoiser des animaux sauvages :renard des sables, gazelle, caméléon, bébé phoque, puma, lionceau, qu’il embarquait parfois dans son avion, au grand dam de ses mécaniciens - l’un d’eux finira à l’hôpital, après l’épisode du lionceau
Élève très moyen, Saint-Exupéry échoue à l’examen d’entrée de l’École navale, et c’est par dépit qu’il fera son service militaire dans l’aviation.
Saint-Exupéry fut le seul pilote étranger autorisé à monter à bord de l’avion géant soviétique Tupolev ANT-20 Maxim Gorky.
Il a aussi été un homme de sciences :il détient près d’une dizaine de brevets d’inventions techniques, et a aussi mis au point de nombreux problèmes mathématiques, dont le problème du Pharaon publié à son retour d’Égypte.
Lors de l’émission du billet de 50 francs français à l’effigie d’Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, la Banque de France avait commis une coquille en typographiant le nom « Antoine de Saint-Éxupéry » sur le billet.
Orson Welles avait acheté les droits du Petit Prince et avait proposé à Walt Disney de l’adapter en animation. Après l’avoir lu, Disney a dit qu’il n’y avait pas de place pour deux génies dans l’entreprise.
La grande maison de Charles De Koninck du Vieux-Québec, au 25 de la rue Sainte-Geneviève, (classée depuis monument historique) était un lieu de fréquentation des personnalités des mondes universitaire, scientifique, intellectuel et politique. Saint-Exupéry visita les De Koninck en 1942. Son fils, Thomas De Koninck était alors âgé de huit ans. Ce dernier a conservé les bribes de quelques moments vécus avec Saint-Exupéry :« Un grand gaillard. C’était l’aviateur. Un bonhomme attachant, qui s’intéressait à nous, les enfants. Il nous faisait des avions en papier, des dessins. […] Il aimait les énigmes mathématiques. » L’année suivante, Saint-Exupéry publiait Le Petit Prince. Selon la légende locale, Saint-Exupéry se serait inspiré du petit De Koninck, qui avait les cheveux blonds bouclés et posait beaucoup de questions. M. De Koninck refuse cependant cette interprétation :« Le Petit Prince, c’est Saint-Exupéry lui-même ».
Le 29 juin 2010, 110 ans exactement après sa naissance, les internautes se rendant sur le site Google.fr ont pu voir que le logo était décoré avec une illustration du Petit Prince.