SAINT-EXUPÉRY Antoine de (1900-1944) aviateur et ecrivain.

Lot 792
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Estimation :
3000 - 4000 EUR
Result with fees
Result : 7 800EUR
SAINT-EXUPÉRY Antoine de (1900-1944) aviateur et ecrivain.
AUTHORIZED MANUSCRIPT, [Appeal to the Americans, 1942]; 2.5 in-4 pages on 3 sheets of yellow peel paper paginated a to c. Vibrant, unpublished appeal to the Americans to enter the war and save France from Nazism. It comes out of the exhibition of French Art: "I come out of it with anger. Cézanne, Van Gogh, Renoir, my contemporaries, my brothers"; but this luminous world is threatened by Marshal Pétain and the Nazis, who do not allow those who do not think like them to live. "Do not say that it is not your business. For you hold the keys. You don't choose the keys you hold. If one of your children drowns before your eyes, it's none of my business. It's not my fault that I hold the key to reaching out and saving them. And yet this key, which I did not choose that God should suddenly put in my hand, I have no right to ignore it. It has fallen to me as an inheritance because I am a man. If that is not man, I would like you to explain to me what you call a civilization. Especially a Christian civilization. [...] To be a man is to be responsible. And to the extent that I am a man I am responsible for the fate of the H[oms]". And he speaks of his own involvement [in Group 33 and the Battle of Arras, discussed in War Pilot]: "We thought we were going to die - and I fought - and I refused to fight and go to live during the war the happy and in any case safe life of the United States. ... We lost seventeen of the twenty-three crews in my group. I accepted seventeen chances out of twenty-three to leave the bones in this story. And since in this country it is obligatory to be an agent of some person I was an agent of man. ...I know a man in a man even if he doesn't think like me. Otherwise it is not the man I worship, it is me. And this is barbaric sect. And man's life if I hold the key in my hands then I am responsible for it. I am not free to choose my duties. That would be too easy. I think there is even here a hidden definition of duty : duty is what you
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