A Beloved and Timeless Classic
Few books in any language have the lasting appeal for both children and adult audiences as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s classic, The Little Prince, first published on April 6, 1943. Generations of readers and listeners have loved this novella with its fairy tale-like structure and its sweet, gentle, and yet also satirical humor and pathos. Le Petit Prince has been translated into an astonishing 300 languages. Although told as a children’s story, Saint-Exupéry delights in poking fun at many absurdities of grown-ups. Indeed, professional critics have suggested that the novella should be required reading for adults a minimum of at least once a year.
The story is divided into three relatively equal parts. When the story opens a pilot has crashed his small aircraft in the vast Sahara Desert at least one thousand miles from any inhabited region. He has no mechanic with him and he has only enough water to last for eight days. Following his first night of sleeping in the immense unknown he is startled by the appearance of a small boy who is from a tiny planet, Asteroid B-612, far, far away. As a child the man had aspirations to become an artist, but adults told him to put away such nonsense and apply himself to the study of geography, history, arithmetic, and grammar. Instead of an artist the man grew up to become an aviator. Because he was discouraged from drawing at an early age he is not sure he can fulfill the small visitor’s first request, “Please...draw me a sheep…” When the pilot does create satisfying drawings, the little prince shares many facts about his own home planet. It is very tiny and he loves it very much. He has the frustration of invasive infant baobab trees and he also must tend to three volcanoes (two active and one extinct), but he loves the sunsets that occur forty-four times daily. Most of all, the young prince worships a single, dazzling rose that he has cared for faithfully.
The middle segment of The Little Prince recounts his travels to six Asteroids, 325 through 330, and the sole inhabitants he has met on each. Asteroid 325 is ruled over by a king who reigns majestically by making constant commands to subjects who appear to be nonexistent. As he travels further, the young prince meets a very vain man, a drunkard, and a businessman who does nothing but calculate the number of stars in the universe that he believes belong to him exclusively. Perhaps the most conscientious man the young traveler meets is a lamplighter whose home planet has shrunk to the point to where he has only time enough to light and then immediately extinguish a solitary street lamp due to the ever-increasing planetary revolutions. His work is so demanding that he can never find any time for rest. After leaving the exhausted lamplighter, the young boy visits a far larger Asteroid that is inhabited by a geographer who writes enormous books even though he knows nothing about cities, rivers, mountains, seas, oceans, and deserts. The geographer tells him that such knowledge could only be known by explorers.
After such unusual travels, the young adventurer arrives on the enormous planet, Earth. The third segment of The Little Prince begins as he starts to meet some of the unique inhabitants of the immense desert where he finds himself. His initial encounter is with a poisonous snake who speaks only in riddles. The little prince then meets anthropomorphic beings that include a single, lonely flower, a chorus of 5,000 roses, and a fox who wants to be tamed and who claims to have a great secret that the young protagonist needs. He also meets a railway switchman who has the futile and thankless task of dispatching thousands of travelers (think grown-ups) who have no idea of where they are going. He also meets a sales clerk of questionable morality who sells pills that purport to quench the thirst of desert visitors.
The snake and the fox have crucial roles in final segment of The Little Prince. The snake proffers an unthinkable way for the little prince to return to his home planet. The fox shares a valuable secret to the young prince.
Here is my secret. It’s quite simple. One sees clearly only with the heart.
Anything essential is invisible to the eyes.
In addition to the fable-like animals and flowers the little prince meets when he first arrives on the planet Earth, he also discovers the location of a well that is unlike any spring of fresh water the pilot has ever seen in the immense Sahara Desert. The pilot has run out of his meager supply of water, so the little prince has the opportunity to repay him for the things he has been given: drawings of baobabs and sheep, plus a crate and muzzle for the sheep. In return, the little prince offers a parting gift to the pilot, a reason to listen to the stars. They will forever sound like five hundred million little bells to the pilot.
Six years after his crash in the Sahara Desert and his meeting with the little prince the pilot sketches a landscape of the exact place where his adventures with the young boy from Asteroid B-612 began. He asks his friends and other pilots to seek for the same desert standpoint so they, too, may experience the wonders that he has experienced.
If all has gone well, the little prince is back on his tiny planet fulfilling his duty to take special care of his single rose to keep it safe from a muzzled sheep, to rake away the debris of two active volcanoes (and one dormant cone), to watch beautiful sunsets forty-four times a day and to listen to the five hundred million tiny bells of the stars in the universe.
If the ending sounds like Heaven perhaps it should. Slightly more than a year after The Little Prince was first published in the United States, its author, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, re-enlisted as a pilot in the French air squadron. Despite being forbidden to fly while he was recovering from injuries from earlier plane crashes, Saint-Exupéry left Corsica on a reconnaissance mission across the huge Mediterranean Sea. He never returned nor was he ever seen again. Perhaps he is now listening to the laughter of the little prince and sharing the beauty of Asteroid B-612. One can only hope so.
Much of the appeal of The Little Prince is due to the integration of Saint-Exupéry’s simple and delicate watercolor illustrations that have an ethereal charm. Perhaps in keeping with his self-mocking admission that he was forced to forego drawing at the tender age of six, the narrator is the only character in the novella that is never portrayed in the endearing artwork.
Any book that has been translated into more than three hundred languages is bound to be available in many editions. This review is based on Richard Howard’s translation (Harcourt, 2000). Readers of all ages will also become mesmerized with The Little Prince Deluxe Pop-Up Book (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009) that is filled with inter-active marvels of paper engineering. Countless flaps, pop-ups, and pull-tabs are featured in this unabridged edition that is also translated by Richard Howard.
Saint-Exupéry, Antoine, de. The Little Prince. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Harcourt, 2000.
