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dark purple & black hardcover 8vo. (octavo). dustwrapper in protective plastic book jacket cover. very fine cond. mint cond. looks new. like new. as new. binding square & tight. covers clean. edges clean. contents free of markings. dustwrapper in fine cond. not worn or torn or price clipped. nice clean copy. no library markings, store stamps, stickers, bookplates, no names, inking, underlining, remainder markings etc~. first american edition so stated. first printing. color decorative endpapers. b&w frontis. portrait. xx+308p.+colophon. glossy b&w photo illustrations. memoirs. english literature. french literture. biography. ~ IN THE SPRING OF 1944, Antoine de Saint~Exupery left his wife, Consuelo, to return to the war in Europe. Soon after, he disappeared while flying a reconnaissance mission over occupied France. Neither his plane nor his body was ever found. The Tale of the Rose is Consuelo's account of their extraordinary marriage. It is a love story about a pilot and his wife, a man who yearned for the stars and the spirited woman who gave him the strength to fulfill his dreams. Consuelo Suncin Sandoval de Gomez and Antoine de Saint~Exupery met in Buenos Aires in 1930~she a seductive young widow, he a brave pioneer of early aviation, decorated for his acts of heroism in the deserts of North Africa. He was large in his passions, a fierce loner with a childlike appetite for danger. She was frail and voluble, exotic and capricious. Within hours of their first encounter, he knew he would have her as his wife. Their love affair and marriage would take them from Buenos Aires to Paris to Casablanca to New York. It would take them through periods of betrayal and infidelity, pain and intense passion, devastating abandonment and tender, poetic love. Several times in the course of their marriage they would go their separate ways, but always they would return. The Tale of the Rose is the story of a man of extravagant dreams, and of the woman who was his muse, the inspiration for the Little Prince's beloved rose unique in all the world~whom he could not live with and could not live without. Written on Long Island in a quiet spell of reconciliation, The Little Prince was Antoine's greatest gift to the woman he never stopped loving, the only child to emerge from their union. The Tale of the Rose is Consuelo's reply ~ the love letter she never could write to her husband ~ a fable of its own, Just as magical, poetic, and tragic as The Little Prince. CONSUELO DE SAINT~EXUPERY wrote The Tale of the Rose in 1945. She died in 1979, thirty~five years after her husband, never having published her story. The manuscript, sealed away in a trunk, was discovered in 1999 by an academic doing research for a new biography of her husband. A number one bestseller, its publication in France was a national sensation. It has been translated into sixteen languages.
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