The question of why the plane crashed is unlikely to be resolved by the scattered debris; that it crashed could not be said to have been unexpected. Saint-Exupéry was his squadron's record-holder of near-disasters. Having waged a campaign to talk his way back into active service, he was piloting a plane into which he did not fit and which he could not comfortably fly. He was unable to communicate with the control tower in English. The operation of hydraulic brakes defied him. Routinely, he confused feet and meters.

The French pilots in Corsica knew Saint-Exupéry as a prize-winning author and a pioneer of aviation. The Americans knew him only as an outsized, overaged, undertrained wreck of a man, one who only eight weeks into his time with them mangled an $80,000 aircraft. For that mishap he was unceremoniously grounded. He begged for leniency; he was, he protested, willing to die for his country. ''I don't give a damn if you die for France or not,'' Col. Leon Gray informed Saint-Exupéry, ''but you're not going to do so in one of our airplanes.'' It was a case of one national treasure against another.

It was also a case in which Saint-Exupéry got his way. He had long outlived the era in which he felt comfortable; he could imagine himself nowhere but in the cockpit of a plane. He had all his life dreamed of escape, pined for broader horizons, threatened to change planets. More and more he felt alienated from his own countrymen, whose infighting he had criticized; fiercely anti-Nazi, he supported neither de Gaulle nor the Communists. He predicted that liberation would not put France out of its misery. ''Many people,'' he warned in 1944, ''are going to be shot next year.'' In a particularly bleak mood he imagined himself to be one of them.

From his personal frustrations and his inability to make his political positions understood came ''The Little Prince,'' the modest volume under which has swelled a great grassy knoll of literature. Published in 1943 but a best seller only later, the text read eerily as a death foretold, its mystique enhanced by the parallel between author and subject: imperious innocents whose lives consist of equal parts flight and failed love, who fall to earth, are little impressed with what they find here and ultimately disappear without a trace.

Naturally it is easier to predict your own death if you are willing to commit suicide, and for those inclined to such readings there is the mystical matter of the sunsets. The little prince lives on a planet so small that he is able to watch the sun set precisely 44 times in a day -- case-clinchingly, the age of Saint-Exupéry at his death. (For some inexplicable reason, the prince witnesses 44 sunsets only in the English translation. In the original, he watches 43.) That Saint-Exupéry had no desire to go on living was clear; that he meant to kill himself is not.