A lost castle, two wild girls: the story behind the sisters who inspired "The Little Prince"

The book The little princesof Nicolás Herzog and Lina Vargas, recovers the story a bit true, another popular myth, which locates the origins of The little Prince in the suburbs of Concordia, city of the appriana where its author, French Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, had to land by force in the 30s, due to a malfunction of the monoplane that was flying.

The story goes that one day between December 1929 and January 1930, the Latecoere flying at Saint-Exupéry broke down, the pilot descended from the distress field he saw below, a wheel of the plane walked on a vizcachera and, while examining the scope of the wounded, the laughter of some girls, who laughed at him in their language, took him out of the trance: they were Suzanne and Edda Fuchs, the sisters of 12 and 18 who would feed the imagination of one of the most read books of universal literature.

Susana and Edda, surprises that the writer and the pilot understood, went to ask for help and it was their father, Mr. Fuchs, who took the aviator to San Carlos Castle, the somewhat neglected mansion where the family lived in a wild corner of Salto Chico on the Uruguay River, the house that would take him back to the country of his childhood in St. Maurice of Remens, where he found the reparo which, nine years later, gave substance to "Oasis", fifth chapter of his novel Land of men.

The publication of the label Ariel is a continuation of the film Night flight, a hybrid between documentary and fiction directed by Nicolás Herzog (Santa Fe, 1979), which takes up history, extracted from the family story of Elsa Aparicio Pico in 1953, teacher and translator of the French friend of the family who began to investigate and was the first to report to The little Prince with the visit that the aviator and the writer had made to the Fuchs.

If the filmmaker notices the attraction of Saint-Exupéry by these young women and their link with animals and the cosmos (they ride, fish, talk with vermin, have formed a fox), it also speaks about the fact Imagination of a community that oral tradition prefers to call them girls and compose love stories with a 29 year old stranger who arrives at his home.

"There is something that has to do with the myth that is wrought around the place, the social fabric that ran through generations, always with very little documentation." Concordia is a bipolar, patriarchal and misogynistic city, with a hard core that pivots between intellectual, bourgeois and the cradle of Entre Ríos Peronism Something different here and I was interested in integrating that tone into the construction of its myths, "says Herzog.

In the book, Lina Vargas (Bogotá, 1985) extends this register: she develops the childhood of Antoine Jean Baptiste Marie Roger (1900-1944), real name of Saint-Exupéry, his love of aviation, his own mission to intercommunicate the world as a bridge when he starts flying for Aeropostal, to draw roads across Africa and South America, its connection with the death and history of the mythical castle, which is now part of a national park.

"In the childhood of Saint-Exupéry, all his work germinates, and the visit to the castle of San Carlos, in the middle of nature, evokes that period that he shared with his brothers of games and dances. a constant creativity: they drew, they wrote, the Sun King, his nickname as a child, he made poems and woke up the family to read them, they played, they invented devices, they liked music, "remarks Vargas.

For this reason, he warns, "I do not claim that Susana and Edda are silent and static muses, but as girls having a voice with adults, they expressed their opinions at the table, which was not not common at the time, the freedom and well-being that was also common in his family. "

Beyond the relationship with the Fuchs, there is also the legend of the castle, the Louis XV style house with 27 rooms with terrace on the river, marble floors, velvet curtains and iron gate that was completed in 1888 at the request of Édouard de Machy, a young man who squandered the fortune of his father banker at lavish parties and deceptive projects and who disappeared without a trace four years later.

The book also reveals "a matriarchal lineage of strong and empowered women," says Vargas: Marie Suzanne Valon, Mrs Fuchs, "played golf (he did it until he was 75), drove and sometimes, when the car did not start, he pushed her husband and got behind the wheel , he rolled, smoked, drank whiskey, baptized in the air adventure that the couple leaves France and moved to San Carlos in 1908, loves nature and pbades it on to his children ".

"Finally, there is his connection to death," he says. Forty and physically suffering from air accidents he suffered, Saint-Exupéry publishes War pilot (1942), one of the sides of the piece that completes The little Prince (1943).

And like the character who lets the snake inoculate his poison to return to his asteroid, the oasis for children, Saint Exupéry leaves New York where he had gone, disapproving De Gaulle's resistance policy of resistance. Anti-Nazi and returns to the Allied Reconnaissance Squadron Finally, it disappears flying over the Tyrrhenian Sea on July 30, 1944.