The Tale of the Rose
The Passion That Inspired The Little Prince
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
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 Tale 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 Gómez 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. The Tale of the Rose is Consuelo’s reply—the love letter she never could write to her husband—a fable of its own, just as magical, poetic, and tragic as The Little Prince.
Praise for The Tale of the Rose
“We find in these pages all the tenderness and patience, but also the tenacity, of a woman who loves. Consuelo does not seek to explain or even to understand her husband, she accepts him and leads him to what he must be. . . . Written with a strong and authentic voice, The Tale of the Rose is a book to read for its strength of character, and for the adventure that it offers.”—Elle
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Twice widowed and not yet 30, Consuelo Suncin married the dashing young aviator Comte Antoine de Saint-Exup ry in 1931. As depicted in this posthumous memoir (written in 1945, it lay undiscovered until the 1990s), they were an impossible couple: childlike and terminally irresponsible, Saint-Ex (as his friends called him) broke engagements without a word to disappear for months. Consuelo sometimes na ve, often egotistical, and always temperamental frequently exploded in nervous fits (one acquaintance described her as "Surrealism made flesh"). From Buenos Aires to Casablanca, Paris and New York, they failed to establish a home for themselves; Saint-Ex repeatedly fled the constraints of marriage, only to find he could not write without his wife's support and inspiration. She, for her part, loved him too much to leave him for good. Friends described Consuelo as a charming storyteller, always ready with a vivid observation ("She had the face of an umbrella" is her stab at a suspected rival). At its most heartrending, this book tells the story of a proud, charismatic woman who lived only for her husband, following him from continent to continent as he deceived and neglected her, then pleaded for her return when he began writing again. In 1943 he wrote The Little 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. For his many devotees, this memoir will offer an intimate glimpse of the strange and passionate life behind his mysterious work.
