Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was a famous writer and an intrepid aviator. However, through the reading of The Tale of the Rose, we discover that he was also a hyperactive, talkative, arrogant, inconsistent, determined, resolute, manipulative man; and a big child who tripped over the doors.

And that portrait so deep, human and contradictory, away from the myths that can surround anyone who has been kissed by fame, could only come from one person: his wife, Consuelo.
After the disappearance of her husband in 1944, Consuelo, widow of Saint-Exupéry, wrote about his life with him. At times a personal memory, at times a novel, and at times also an extensive letter for his Tonio, the man whom he loved and who loved her during those stormy years their relationship lasted. Perhaps for that reason, The Tale of the Rose was never published in the course of the life of Consuelo and it was necessary to wait until the year 2000 to be able to read it.
Consuelo tells that when she met her Tonio, he immediately approached her, courting her and inviting her to board her plane that same night. He blackmailed her with a kiss, insisted, cried, read a fragment of his book Southern Mail and showed her a film that he had filmed himself. He overwhelmed her completely from the first moment! Fearful of such intensity, and prophetic perhaps without fully knowing it, she anticipated what their relationship would be:

“- Forgive me, I'm not sure how a woman is. […]
- In the end you will hurt me. You're a little crazy.”

When reading his book and hearing him tell the stories Saint-Exupéry told about Africa and about so many things, Consuelo tells him that he should write them. "What a charm in his images, what a fierce mixture of reality and implausibility!" she confesses and from the first moment she felt committed to promote and support her Tonio to write, becoming his muse and his guide. She prevented him from accepting an office job at the Renault because, she told him: "Your way is in the stars". And despite recognizing that being a writer's wife was a priesthood, she felt rewarded when her beloved promised her "... I will write because you ask me to". She decided to support her husband, the artist, because she herself understood what art was: she was a writer, a painter and a sculptor.

But despite this dedication and self-denial, Consuelo must have suffered a lot alongside the French aviator. First before the rejection of the family of Tonio for their relationship. Consuelo wasn't French (she was from El Salvador); then she had to wait for sleepless nights until he came back from the dangerous missions he was carrying out for the Aeropostale, the post office, then the state, along with other men, many of which didn't return. Added to that was the impulsive nature of her husband: on the night of her engagement, she fired her on the runway because she had to go out to take the mail and on one occasion sent her to look for France and when she arrived in New York, he dragged her to a dinner with other people and then left her alone in a suite.

Saint-Ex was several times near death. The first of these when he was trying to land a hydroplane, from which he escaped with minor injuries. Later he was saved from dying on board a Russian plane that he had to fly the day it crashed, but which fortunately he had pilot just the day before. Then, to persecute Consuelo who had decided to separate from him (he agreed), crashed in Guatemala, suffering 32 fractures throughout the body. And in all those opportunities in which he crossed the sky over a remote spot, down on the ground, was his little Consuelo longing for his return.

To the intensity of her husband and their relationship, we can add the time they lived (they were in Spain when a revolution broke out, they were together at the beginning of World War II) and the spaces they shared: in the house in Paris , Rue de Castellane 10, Verlaine and Oscar Wilde had gone through bad times a few decades ago; a woman and two men had tried to commit suicide; and Gómez Carrillo, Consuelo's previous husband, had died there in her arms. It should be noted here that Consuelo, although young, was already a widow when she met Antoine. History seems to have prepared her for what she would later have to relive, as if his life had been marked, in advance, by the tragedy.

They shared times, moments, very happy together. Antoine was a romantic capable of the most beautiful gestures, like crossing the whole ocean just to see her, but then having her close, his melancholy overwhelmed him and said things like these:

“I still don't know how to be your husband. I apologize”

“…I apologize for all the sorrows I have caused you and that I will cause you…”

“I said to myself: it's for life, but I'm not sure to make her happy”

All this, the personality of her husband, his reputation as a writer, being surrounded by so many personalities among which André Gide, André Maurois, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich and hundreds of admirers of the writer, turned her relationship in "... a perpetual crossroads of love and separation". Consuelo confesses in her memories "I loved him, but I also realized how peaceful my life was without him". They seemed condemned to pursue together a happiness they knew they couldn't reach. They needed each other. They couldn't be together, but they were unable to separate.

It was a relationship where Tonio represented instability and Consuelo the eternal waiting, a love marked by unfulfilled promises, imbalance, selfishness, infidelities of both parts, and of course, although it seems contradictory, love itself. Consuelo, unjustly immortalized in The Little Prince as a proud rose with thorns, said "The happiness of which he spoke to me was always postponed from one day to the next" and as if to confirm his judgment, in one of the lasts conversations who kept, in life, with her husband, he made a last promise that would not fulfill, promising the second part of The Little Prince:

“Give me your handkerchief to write the second part of The Little Prince on it. At the end of the story, The Little Prince will give this handkerchief to the Princess. You will never be a rose with thorns again, but the dreamed Princess who always waits at The Little Prince. And I will dedicate the book to you. I can't forgive myself for not having dedicated it to you.”

A story at the height of the great romantic tragedies of Literature. The story of a woman, of a love that remained unknown to us under the shadow of the legacy of a great writer, marked as many by the sign of unhappiness. Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry, like her husband, didn't live that beautiful story that many imagine, judging by how little they know the real life of the famous writer; However, were all these storms necessary to produce these immortal works? Consuelo herself says that perhaps with another person, he could have written other better books. That will never be known, but what is known is that despite the shared unhappiness, she represented the necessary support who gave the author and the world those books. All that and more is contained in this book, in the memories of a self-sacrificing Princess, disguised for eternity under the appearance of a weak and proud rose, inhabitant of the asteroid B612.