Goodnight, sweet prince

Habib Benamor was sorting sardines and mullet on the deck of the Marseille trawler "L'Horizon" when he saw something glitter in a mineral concretion he'd pulled up in his net. Benamor tossed the stone onto the bridge, and when he'd finished with the catch he hit it with a hammer. "It was all black, like coal mixed with seashells and sediment," the Tunisian fisherman told Le Figaro. "There was a sort of fabric surrounding the piece of jewellery that looked like it had been burned, melted by heat . . ."

The i.d. bracelet that Benamor found last September was tarnished and coated with muck from the seabed. He gave it to his boss, the trawler's captain Jean-Claude Bianco, who rubbed it with an abrasive dish pad. "I saw `Antoine' appear, and I said to myself, `Hey, that's my middle name, after my grand-father'. I kept scratching, and then I read `Saint-Exupery', and putain! ery returned to haunt his beloved France. The chances of finding the bracelet in the Mediterranean were infinitesimal. Yet when the discovery was finally revealed at the end of October, no one contested its authenticity. The bracelet also bore the name of Consuelo, Saint-Ex's Salvadoran-born wife, and the name and address of his New York publishers. The subsequent media coverage and a dispute over the fate of Saint-Ex's Lockheed P-38 Lightning aircraft have been commensurate with his legend.

Had he died an old man in his sleep, The Little Prince would have guaranteed Antoine de Saint-Exupery a place in literary history. First published in the US in 1943, the tale of a planet-hopping blond extra-terrestrial in a yellow aviator's scarf has sold nearly 50 million copies in 102 languages. French intellectuals turn up their noses at the children's classic - and at the simple humanism and praise of fraternity in his novels. But the public is still fascinated by this philosophical "man of action". The mystery surrounding his death has only strengthened the Saint-Exupery myth.

Saint-Ex's father, the Count de Saint-Exupery, died in 1904 when Antoine was four years old and his devoted mother raised her five children in a country chateau. Without her knowing it, he persuaded an early French aviator to take him up in a plane when he was only 12. Ten years later, the fledgling pilot fell in love with Louise de Vilmorin, a literary socialite who would also ensnare the writer Andre Malraux. To placate Vilmorin's aristocratic family, Saint-Ex made a failed attempt at a career in business. The engagement ended, but the sad love affair provided him with material for his first novel, Southern Mail.

Nursing his broken heart, Saint-Ex went to the director of the French international air mail company, Latecoere, and announced: "Monsieur, I want to fly, only to fly". Latecoere's motto was "the mail must get through", and nearly 100 of his pilots died in terrible conditions - burned alive in their cock-pits, drowned in the sea or frozen in the Andes. Saint-Ex was never a good pilot - his multiple crashes left him with fractured bones and a paralysed upper arm. Mechanics regarded him as reckless because he insisted on flying aircraft with faulty engines or drew sketches of the sea as he flew metres above the whitecaps.

It was in Buenos Aires, where he became the director of Aeroposta Argentina in 1928, that Saint-Ex met Consuelo Suncin de Sandoval, the widow of a Guatemalan writer. He sent some of his substantial earnings home to his mother, the Countess, then squandered the rest in nightclubs. His marriage to Consuelo was a tormented one. She frequented an artistic crowd and was prone to drinking and having affairs in his absence but, despite his grief at Consuelo's infidelity, Saint-Ex couldn't stop loving her.

When I met Consuelo de Saint-Exupery in 1976, I was a student at the Sorbonne, writing a thesis about her husband. The events of this autumn prompted me to open my yellowing volume of Saint-Ex's works, and there, like an i.d. bracelet buried in a mineral concretion, I found Consuelo's drawing of the Little Prince with his head in the stars, and her message to me, "in memory of my husband", in an old woman's scrawl. Consuelo wore a dressing gown and complained that she didn't have the energy to go to the hairdresser. A younger, Spanish-speaking man - a romantic attachment, I learned later - ran errands for her. When she died a few years later, he became the executor of her estate.

"I was the rose in The Little Prince," Consuelo told me repeatedly, referring to the vain and prickly flower, so proud of her pathetic little thorns, that the Little Prince fretted over during his long journey. When he caught her lying, the rose coughed with embarrassment and the Little Prince sadly departed.

"I should not have listened to her," he said in the children's book. "One should never listen to flowers. One should look at them and smell them."

Despite their painful marriage, Saint-Ex remained devoted to Consuelo. "If I am wounded, I will have someone to care for me," he wrote to her shortly before his death as a second World War pilot. "If I am killed, I will have someone to wait for in eternity. And if I return, will I have someone to return to?"

Saint-Exupery was so depressed by the Nazi occupation of France and Consuelo's bad habits that his friends believed he committed suicide at the controls of his Lightning - just as the Little Prince asked the viper to sting him so he could return to his asteroid. "I don't care if I come back," he wrote to a friend shortly before his disappearance. "I have the impression that we are marching towards the darkest days in the history of the world," he wrote in a manuscript published posthumously. The age limit for piloting the Lightning was supposed to be 30 - Saint-Ex was 44, but badgered Free French and US officials to let him fly. He was also demoralised by the power struggle among exiled French leaders and the backlash against him from followers of Gen Charles de Gaulle. Saint-Ex refused to support de Gaulle, and one theory, put forward by Harris Smith in his history of the OSS (Office of Strategic Services, the precursor of the CIA), says he may have been the victim of a political assassination.

The simplest explanation for Saint-Ex's disappearance is probably the correct one, and could soon be proven if the wreckage of his aircraft is found. Lieutenant Robert Heichele was a young German pilot whose log book was discovered in December 1980, by a former Luftwaffe fighter pilot and admirer of Saint-Ex. Heichele was himself killed in combat several days after he appears to have shot down the French writer.

"I got up to . . . 60 metres from him and fired on him," the German recorded on July 31st, 1944, the day Saint-Ex disappeared.

"Then I saw the Lightning falling with a white trail . . . He passed over the coast and flew at a low altitude towards the sea.

Suddenly, flames came out of the right engine. The wing clipped the sea. The plane spun several times and disappeared into the water at 12.05 p.m. about 10 km south of Saint-Raphael."

The German apparently did not realise that Saint-Ex's aircraft was unarmed. In his diary the following day, he boasted: "Without having obtained a fighter pilot's qualification, I downed a Lightning in air combat, and without any damage to my machine."

The night Habib Benamor found Saint-Exupery's bracelet, the trawler's captain Jean-Claude Bianco slept with it on his bedside table. It is now in a government safe in Paris, and will be handed over to the Saint-Exupery family. The following day, over a glass of pastis, Bianco gave the bracelet to Henri-Germain Delauze, the owner of the Marseille-based undersea research company COMEX, which helped to explore the Spanish armada ship, Gerona, off the coast of Ireland in 1968.

In the same catch, Benamor and Bianco found two pieces of aluminium debris, one of them the crosspiece that held the radio in the P-38 Lightning. Delauze thought the rest of the wreck must be nearby, so using his sonar-equipped oceanographic ship Minibex and a remotely operated vehicle, he spent the following two months combing 600 nautical miles of seabed.

By the end of October, word of COMEX's search leaked out. Fred eric d'Agay, the litigious representative of the Saint-Exupery heirs, sent a bailiff to COMEX to demand the bracelet and to forbid it being photographed. Mr d'Agay also asked that COMEX abandon the search for Saint-Ex's watery grave.

The request was echoed by those who had known him, including the 91-year-old writer Jules Roy, who told Le Nouvel Observateur: "I am sad and angry. Why the hell don't they leave Saint-Ex alone!

Besides the fact that I feel that in July 1944 he really wanted to die, the ocean is his tomb now . . . legendary heroes are the ones never found."

Michele Fructus, the daughter of COMEX founder Delauze and a director of the company, told The Irish Times that although the company ceased work in mid-November to maintain equipment, they will discreetly resume the search soon. As a contractor for the French navy, COMEX is wellplaced to obtain the necessary permits. "The wreck belongs to the French Air Force - not to the Saint-Exupery family," Fructus said. "We could start looking again quietly, without the public knowing . . . Sometimes we find wrecks without really looking for them. We have never proposed raising the wreck of Saint-Ex's plane - we only want to identify it. We're not grave robbers. For us, it's in the interest of history."