Salvadoran-French writer and artist, and the wife of the French aristocrat, writer and pioneering aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. He was her third husband, and as such, Consuelo de Saint Exupéry was officially titled Consuelo Suncín, comtesse (countess) de Saint Exupéry.
Despite their tumultuous relationship, Antoine kept Consuelo close to his heart. She is the likely inspiration of the major character in The Little Prince, the prince’s ‘flower’, identified as The Rose, whom he protects under glass and with a windscreen on his tiny planet which is named Asteroid B-612.
Following the disappearance of her husband Saint-Exupéry in July 1944, she purportedly wrote a memoir of their life together, The Tale of the Rose, which was sealed away in a trunk in her home. Two decades after her death in 1979, the manuscript came to light when José Martinez-Fructuoso, her heir and long-time employee, and his wife, Martine, discovered it in an attic trunk. Alan Vircondelet, author of a biography of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, edited it, improving her French and dividing it into chapters. Its publication in France in 2000, one century after Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s birth on 29 June 1900, became a national sensation. As of 2011 it had been translated into sixteen languages.
Consuelo died from asthma at age 78 on 28 May 1979 and is buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, alongside her second husband Enrique Carrillo.
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