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Matthew Patay's
Note of the Month
May 2006
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Map and flag images provided by Graphic Maps
This month's featured note
is from the France.
The denomination is 50 Francs and the Standard Catalog of World Paper Money
(SCWPM) Number is P-157Ac.
The note, now obsolete, is dated 1999. France is currently under the Euro monetary system.
(front)
The banknote is purple and dark blue on blue, green and multi-colored underprint.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
(June 29, 1900 – July 31, 1944), French writer and aviator is at
right center. "The Little Prince" is at bottom left and a topograpic map
of Africa is at center.
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The following information
was obtained from:
Wikipedia the
Free Encyclopedia
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
(1900 - 1944)
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (June 29, 1900 – July 31, 1944) was a French writer and aviator. One of his most famous works is Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince) .
Life
Count Antoine Marie Roger de Saint-Exupéry was born in Lyon into an old family of provincial nobility, the third of five children of Count Jean de Saint-Exupéry, an insurance broker who died when his famous son was three, and his wife, Marie de Foscolombe.
After failing his final exams at a preparatory school, he entered the École des Beaux-Arts to study architecture. In 1921, he began his military service in the 2nd Regiment of Chasseurs, and was sent to Strasbourg for training as a pilot. The next year, he obtained his license and was offered a transfer to the air force. But his fiancée's family objected, so he settled in Paris and took an office job. His engagement was ultimately broken off, however, and he worked at several jobs over the next few years without success. He later became engaged to the future novelist Louise Leveque de Vilmorin.
By 1926, he was flying again. He became one of the pioneers of international postal flight in the days when aircraft had few instruments and pilots flew by instinct. Later he complained that those who flew the more advanced aircraft were more like accountants than pilots. He worked on the Aéropostale between Toulouse and Dakar. His first tale L'Aviateur (The Aviator) was published in the magazine Le Navire d'argent. In 1928, he published his first book, Courrier-Sud (Southern Mail), and flew the Casablanca/Dakar route. He became the director of Cape Juby airfield in Río de Oro, Western Sahara. In 1929, Saint-Exupéry moved to South America, where he was appointed director of the Aeroposta Argentina Company.
In 1931, Vol de Nuit (Night Flight), which won the Prix Femina, was published.
In 1931, at Grasse, Saint-Exupéry married Consuelo Suncin Sandoval Zeceña of Gómez, a twice-widowed writer and Salvadorian artist. Theirs was a stormy union as Saint-Exupéry traveled frequently and indulged in numerous affairs.
Saint-Exupéry kept writing and flying until the beginning of World War II. During the war, he initially flew in the French GC II/33 reconnaissance squadron. He then escaped to New York City, and lived in Québec City for a time in 1942. After his time in North America, Saint-Exupéry returned to Europe to fly with the Free French and fight with the Allies in a squadron based in the Mediterranean. Then aged 44, he flew his last mission to collect data on German troop movements in the Rhone River Valley. He took off the night of July 31, 1944, and was never seen again. A lady reported having seen a plane crash around noon of August 1 near the Bay of Carqueiranne. A body wearing a French uniform was found several days later and was buried in Carqueiranne that September.
Discovery of the crash site
In 1998, a fisherman found what was reported to be Saint-Exupéry's silver chain bracelet in the ocean to the east of the island of Riou, south of Marseille. At first it was thought a hoax, but it was later positively identified. It was engraved with the names of his wife and his publishers, Reynal & Hitchcock, and was hooked to a piece of fabric from his pilot's suit.
On April 7, 2004, investigators from the French Underwater Archaeological Department confirmed that the twisted wreckage of a Lockheed P-38 Lightning, found on the seabed off the coast of Marseille in 2000 and extracted in October 2003, was Saint-Exupéry's. The discovery is akin to solving the mystery of where Amelia Earhart's plane went down in the Pacific Ocean in 1937. However, the cause of the crash remains a mystery. Today it is regarded as very improbable that Saint-Exupéry was shot down by a German pilot (in spite of the bragging of a German airman who later claimed so). The German aerial combat records of July 31, 1944 do not list any shooting down in the Mediterranean that day. Besides, the wreckage of Saint-Exupéry's P-38 did not show any traces of shooting or aerial combat. Therefore, it is regarded as most probable that the crash was caused by a technical failure.
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(back)
A Breguet XIV reconnaissance aircraft and
bomber biplane is flying over sand dunes at center and "The Little Prince" is at
bottom right.
The following information
was obtained from:
Wikipedia the
Free Encyclopedia
"The
Little Prince"
(For
the full article, please refer to the link above.)
The Little Prince (French Le Petit Prince), published in 1943, is French aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's most famous novel, which he wrote while staying at a hotel in New York.
Ostensibly a children's book, it makes several profound and idealistic points about life and love. In it, Saint-Exupéry imagines himself stranded in the Sahara Desert, thousands of kilometers away from inhabited places, where he meets a young extra-terrestrial prince. In their conversations, the author reveals his own views about the follies of mankind and the simple truths that people seem to forget as they grow older. The essence of the book is contained in the famous line uttered by the fox to the little prince: "On ne voit bien qu'avec le cœur, l'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux" (You only see rightly with the heart, what matters is invisible to the eyes). There are also two other main points in the book, both spoken by the fox. They are: "You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed" and "It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important".
Throughout the book the children's view on the world, on the main points of the human life and relations between people, which is represented by the Little Prince and partially by the narrator, is set off against the "grown-ups" one, revealed in memories of the narrator and in the characters, met by the Little Prince on asteroids. But the author underlines, that the grown-ups "are like that. One must not hold it against them. Children should always show great forbearance toward grown-up people."
The novel includes a number of drawings by Saint-Exupéry himself, which are reproduced in most versions.
The Little Prince has been translated into many languages and, to date, has sold more than 50 million copies worldwide and turned into an anime series that ran 39 episodes. It is often used as a beginner's book for foreign language students.
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