A Salvadoran, widow of the Guatemalan writer Enrique Gómez Carrillo, she married Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in 1931, and is held to be the rose of The Little Prince. Long reduced to the role of the troublesome wife, she has been read differently since her Mémoires de la rose, published in 2000.
The story
Born in 1901 at Armenia, in El Salvador, Consuelo Suncín de Sandoval, a sculptor and woman of letters, reached Europe in the 1920s. She married the Guatemalan writer Enrique Gómez Carrillo, was widowed a year later, then met in Buenos Aires in 1930 an Aéropostale pilot who wrote books: they married in 1931.
The household was stormy. Saint-Exupéry left, came back, betrayed her, called her to him. She led her own artist's life in the Montparnasse of the 1930s, sculpting, painting, writing. When he vanished at sea in 1944 she was forty-three, and she outlived him by thirty-five years.
The writer's circle long reduced her to the part of a cumbersome wife. The posthumous publication of her Mémoires de la rose in 2000 changed that reading: written in the 1940s, it is the account of an impossible love and of a woman who had been erased.
She died at Grasse in 1979 and lies in Division 89, in the grave of her first husband, Enrique Gómez Carrillo — not beside Saint-Exupéry, whose body was never found.
On site, do not miss
The name of a Guatemalan writer on the stone, and that of a Salvadoran woman beneath: the grave says nothing of The Little Prince.
Visitors' questions
Where is Consuelo de Saint Exupéry's grave?
In Division 89 of Père-Lachaise, in the second row on the Avenue Transversale No. 3 side. Consuelo rests in the grave of her first husband, the writer Enrique Gómez Carrillo, in the same Division as Oscar Wilde.
Enrique Gómez CarrilloIs Consuelo the rose in The Little Prince?
It is the reading most biographers hold to: the proud, fragile rose, complaining of draughts and impossible to love well, points back to their marriage. Saint-Exupéry never set it down in black and white.
Marie LaurencinWhy is she not buried with Saint-Exupéry?
Because he has no grave: his aircraft vanished over the Mediterranean on 31 July 1944 and his body was never found. A cenotaph honours him in the Panthéon. So Consuelo rests in her first husband's vault.
Oscar Wilde, Division 89What is The Tale of the Rose?
The account Consuelo wrote in the 1940s of her life with Saint-Exupéry, left unpublished and brought out in 2000, twenty-one years after her death. It changed the picture of a wife long described as overbearing by the writer's circle.
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