Consuelo and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry met in Buenos Aires in 1930—she a seductive young widow, he a brave pioneer of early aviation, decorated for his acts of heroism in the deserts of North Africa. He was large in his passions, a fierce loner with a childlike appetite for danger. She was frail and voluble, exotic and capricious. Within hours of their first encounter, he knew he would have her as his wife.

Their love affair and marriage would take them from Buenos Aires to Paris to Casablanca to New York. It would take them through periods of betrayal and infidelity, pain and intense passion, devastating abandonment and tender, poetic love. The Tale of the Rose is the story of a man of extravagant dreams and of the woman who was his muse, the inspiration for the Little Prince’s beloved rose—unique in all the world—whom he could not live with and could not live without.

Consuelo de Saint Exupéry (born Armenia, El Salvador, April 10, 1901—died Grasse, France, May 28, 1979) was a Salvadoran-French writer and artist, and wife of the famous writer and aviator Antoine de Saint Exupéry.