Free Flight to Arras by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Page A

spoke of poisonous wasps. That was reality. They were tiny, and they were obscene. It is hard to believe that I invented that disgusting literary image of a dress with a train. I couldn’t have! For one thing, I have never seen the wake of my ship. Here in this cockpit, in which I fit like a pipe in its case, I can see nothing behind me. I see behind me through the eyes of my gunner. And then only if the inter-com is working. My gunner never called down to me, “Adoring suitors aft in the wake of our train!”
    All this is mere juggling with words. Of course I should like to believe, I should like to fight, I should like to win. But try as a man will to pretend to believe, pretend to fight, pretend to win by setting fire to his own villages, it is hard to feel elation over pretense.
    It is hard to exist. Man is a knot into which relationships are tied, and my ties serve me hardly at all.
    What is this in me that has broken down? What is the secret of substitutions? Whence comes it that a gesture, a word, can give rise to endless ripples in a human destiny? Whence comes it that in other circumstances I should be overwhelmed by what seems to me now remote and abstract? Whence comes it that if I were Pasteur, the play of true infusoria would seem to me pathetic to the point where a slide under a microscope would represent something infinitely more vast than a virgin forest, and the watching of that slide would seem to me the most thrilling kind of adventure? Whence comes it that that black dot below, which is a house of men....
    But again a childhood memory returns to me.
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    When I was a small boy.... I speak of my early childhood, that is to say, of a vast region out of which all men emerge. Whence come I? I come from my childhood. I come from childhood as from a homeland.... When I was a small boy, then, I had a queer experience.
    I must have been five or six years old. It was eight in the evening. At eight o’clock children ought to be in bed. Particularly in winter, when night has already fallen. For some reason I had been forgotten.
    On the ground floor of our house in the country—which was big—there was a hall that seemed to me immense. It led into the warm room at the back in which we children were fed our supper. I had always been afraid of that hall, perhaps because of the feeble light of the lamp that hung in the middle of it and scarcely drew it forth from the darkness. A signal rather than a light. The hall was paneled high up, and the paneling creaked, which was another reason for my fear. And it was cold. Coming into it out of the warm and lamplit rooms that lined it was like coming into a cavern.
    But that evening, seeing that I had been forgotten, I gave way to the demon of evil in me, reached up on tiptoe for the handle of our supper-room door, pushed the door softly in, and embarked upon my illicit exploration of the world.
    The creaking of the paneling was the first warning I received of heavenly anger. I could see in the shadow the great reproving panels. Not daring to explore farther, I climbed up on a console table, and there, resting against the wall and letting my legs hang, I sat with beating heart like every shipwrecked sailor before me on his reef in mid-sea.
    At that moment the drawing-room door opened. Two uncles who absolutely terrified me shut the door behind them upon the lights and the hubbub of voices, and began to pace the hall.
    I trembled lest I be discovered. Uncle Hubert was in my eyes the very image of severity, A delegate of divine justice. This man, who never in his life had tweaked a child’s ear or pinched its cheek affectionately, always threatened me when I had been naughty with a terrifying frown and these words: “The next time that I go to America I shall bring back a whipping machine. American machines are the most modern in the world. That is why American children are the best behaved in the world. And a very good thing for their parents,