How does life  construct those lines of force which make us live? What is the magnet which attracts me towards the home of that friend? What are the chief moments that have made this presence one of the poles which I need? What secret events make up special affections, and through them, love of country?

Real miracles make little noise! Essential events are so simple! There is so little to say about the moment which I wish to recount, that I must relive it in a dream, and speak again to that friend.

It was on a pre-war day, on the banks of the Saône, near Tournus. We had chosen for lunch a restaurant with a wooded balcony overlooking the river. Leaning over a simple table, which bore the engravings of some customer’s knife, we had ordered two glasses of Pernod. Your doctor forbade you to drink spirits, but you cheated on special occasions. And this was one. We did not know why, but this was one. Our enjoyment was created by something more impalpable than the quality of light. So you decided for that Pernod of special occasions. And, as two bargees, just near us, were unloading their barge, we invited the bargees. We hailed them from our balcony. And they came. They came, quite simply. We found it so natural to invite some friends, perhaps because of that invisible joy within us. It was so obvious that they would reply to the sign. Then we clinked glasses!

The sunshine was perfect. Its warm honey bathed the poplars on the other bank, and the plain, right to the horizon. We became merrier and merrier, and yet we did not know why. The sun reassured us by shining, the river by flowing, the meal by being the meal, the bargees by responding to our call, the maid by serving us with a sort of happy kindness, as if she were presiding over an eternal feast. We were completely at peace, steadily sheltered from disorder in a permanent civilisation. We were enjoying a sort of perfect state, where, with every wish granted, we had nothing more to confide in one another. We felt pure, right, enlightened and tolerant. We could not have told what truth appeared obvious to us. But our dominant feeling was of certainty, of an almost conceited certainty.

So, through us, the universe proved its good will. The condensation of clouds, the solidification of planets, the formation of the first amoeba, the gigantic labour of evolution which led up to man, everything had happily converged, through us, to that quality of delight. And the result was not so bad.

So we enjoyed that mute understanding and those almost religious rites. Rocked by the coming and going of the holy servant, we and the bargees drank like faithful members of the same church, though we did not know which one. One of the bargees was Dutch, the other one German. The latter had previously fled from the Nazi regime: there he had been prosecuted for being a Communist, or a Trotskyist, or a Catholic, or a Jew. (I do not remember under which label the man was banished.) But at that moment the bargee was something more than a label. Only our content mattered: the human substance. He was a friend, that was all. And we were agreed, between friends. You agreed. I agreed. The bargees and the maid agreed. Agreed on what? On the Pernod? On the significance of life? On the harmony of the day? We could not have said, either. But that agreement was so full, so steadily and deeply established, it applied to a Bible so obvious in its substance, though impossible to put into words, that we would willingly have fortified that inn and opposed a siege, dying there behind the firing guns, to save that substance.

What substance? … Well, that is very difficult to explain. I run the risk of catching only the reflections and not the essentials. My truth will be lost through unsatisfactory words. I shall be obscure, if I pretend that we should easily have fought to save a certain quality of the bargees’ smile, and of your smile, and of mine, and of the maid’s smile; a certain miracle of the sun, which had taken so much trouble, for so many million years, to achieve, through ourselves, that quality of a smile which was pure success.

The essential, most often, has no weight. The essential there, was apparently nothing but a smile. A smile is often the essential. One is paid with a smile. One is rewarded by a smile. And the quality of a smile might make one die.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1943) Lettre à un otage. English translation as Letter to a Hostage, Pushkin Press, London, 1999.