Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry (1901–1979)

Consuelo Suncin Sandoval, the daughter of a wealthy Salvadoran family, met Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1930. She was 29 years old and had been educated in the USA, Mexico, and France. She was a twice-married writer and artist known as a bohemian and free spirit. The couple married and had a stormy relationship, with each having extramarital affairs. Following Saint-Exupéry's mysterious disappearance on a mission over Occupied France in July 1944, Consuelo purportedly wrote a memoir of their life together called The Tale of the Rose, and sealed it away in a trunk in her home. Two decades after her death in 1979, the memoir came to light when José Martinez Fructuoso, Consuelo's long-time employee, and his wife, Martine, discovered it in an attic. French scholar Alan Vircondelet, author of a biography of Saint-Exupéry, edited the manuscript. When the book was published in France in 2000, the centennial of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's birth, it became a national sensation. As of 2011, it had been translated into more than a dozen languages.