These Are the Paths

In Night Flight, Pilot-Novelist Antoine de Saint-Exupery's fine story of commercial aviation, an airline manager gazes gloomily out at a heavy night, in futile search for a lost plane. Absently he fingers a sheaf of teletypes on his desk. "These are the paths death takes to enter here," he says, "messages that have lost their meaning."

"If Anything Happened." One day last week Saint-Exupery's goddaughter rode high in the sky over the Atlantic. Dark-haired Suzanne Roig was the daughter of Georges Roig, an old friend of the novelist and one of France's pioneer aviators himself. "I'll never get tired of traveling," she wrote to a friend recently. Last week she was back at her job as stewardess of a huge Air France Constellation just making ready to come in for a landing at Azores' Santa Maria airfield. The sky around her ship was clear, and laced with invisible, ether-borne messages linking the plane and its 48 passengers to the earth below.

Far beyond Suzanne's horizon, in Canada, The Bronx, West Virginia and Montmartre, bustling, hopeful, confident people were ordering their lives and dreams to fit the big plane's movements. In The Bronx, motherly Mrs. Raoul Silbernagel was busily planning a welcome-home party for her husband, who had been in Europe for three weeks on business. Cesia Lowenstein had only just returned to her Manhattan apartment after divorcing her husband, Ernest, in Reno, but she too was preparing a welcome. "Ernest was always away on business," she explained. "I couldn't follow him abroad because I wanted our son brought up as an American. While I was in Reno, however, Ernest wrote every day, and then he sent me a cable saying he wanted us to remarry."

At Logan, W.Va., Mrs. Mustapha Abdoney, wife of a young farmer on his way from Syria to stay with an uncle, prettied up the 21-month-old baby her husband had not yet seen. In Montreal, Reporter Yves Jasmin, brother of one of Canada's outstanding French-language news editors, had happy news. "I had a letter from Guy," he told friends. "He and mother are expected to land in New York this week." Mrs. Jasmin had been making her first round-trip flight. Before she left, she had told a neighbor that she hoped "if anything was going to happen it would be on the westbound trip, because then she would have seen France."

Prize Packages. There were other passengers on Suzanne's plane, whose plans and hopes for the future were inevitably and inextricably intertwined with those of the earthbound: dapper, 67-year-old Bernard Boutet de Monvel, the famed portraitist son of an even more famed illustrator father (Filles et Garcons, Jeanne d'Arc); lovely Kate Kamen and her shrewd, spectacled husband Kay, the man responsible for bringing Mickey Mouse watches, stuffed Donald Ducks and other Disney-fathered creatures into millions of U.S. nurseries. There was dynamic young (30) Ginette Neveu who in 1947, according to one critic, stepped "practically unknown" upon the stage at Carnegie Hall "and left it as one of the top-rank violinists of our time." Ginette and her brother, Pianist Jean Neveu, were coming to the U.S. for a series of concerts. With her she brought her "most prized possession"--a Stradivarius violin.

For most Frenchmen, however, the most important single item in Suzanne's waybill was tough, pompadoured Marcel Cerdan, the idolized middleweight boxing champ who last June dropped his title to Jake LaMotta in Detroit. "Don't worry, darling," Marcel had told his wife in Casablanca over the phone from Orly Airport last week, "I'll get there and I'll bring back that title." As Marcel and his manager climbed aboard the plane, there was little doubt in French hearts that both prophecies would be borne out.

Silence. Six hours later, at 2:50 a.m., Suzanne's boss, veteran pilot Captain de la Noue, sent a message that soon lost its meaning: "Having accomplished first part of flight normally, ready to land in five minutes at Santa Maria. Weather clear."

That was the last link that held the Constellation and 48 lives to earth. Sometime, somehow, in the next few minutes a heavy cloud and the high peak of Mt. Redondo on Sao Miguel Island combined and snapped the threads. A truckman saw a flash of light on the mountain. Planes took off to search, and eight hours later a twisted, fire-blackened heap was sighted on the mountainside. In the Constellation's wreckage were its 48 dead, burned beyond recognition.

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