О чем рассказ маленький принц экзюпери

Философская сказка-притча «Маленький принц» Антуана де Сент-Экзюпери занимает особое место в творчестве писателя. В ней автор формулирует простые истины и вечные вопросы, с которыми каждый сталкивается в течение жизни. О чем «Маленький принц»? Краткое содержание и анализ помогут разобраться в особенностях литературных образов и раскрыть смысл произведения.

«Маленький принц»: краткое содержание

Повествование ведется от первого лица — летчика, которому повстречался Маленький принц. Экзюпери отчасти наделяет его своими чертами. Он также использует в сюжете эпизод из собственной биографии. В 1935 году писатель предпринял попытку поставить мировой рекорд при перелете Париж–Сайгон, но потерпел аварию в Ливийской пустыне.

С похожей истории начинается и повесть-сказка Экзюпери «Маленький принц». Краткое содержание стоит начать с рассказа героя о своем детстве. Будучи шестилетним мальчиком, он прочитал о том, как удав целиком заглатывает свою жертву. Этот факт сильно впечатлил ребенка, и он нарисовал удава, который проглотил слона. Такая картинка совсем не понравилась взрослым, они посоветовали больше не рисовать змей и заняться учебой.

Герой вырастает, становится летчиком и во время одного из перелетов совершает вынужденную посадку в пустыне Сахара из-за поломки двигателя. Пилот весь день безуспешно пытается починить мотор самолета и засыпает среди бесконечных песков. Утром он его будит маленький мальчик.

Появления главного героя — важный момент в любом произведении, даже если его передает краткое содержание. Маленький принц к огромному изумлению летчика возникает ниоткуда, в абсолютно безлюдном месте, и просит нарисовать барашка.

Как мы помним, в этом рассказчик не силен, и после ряда неудачных попыток он рисует ящик с отверстиями, в котором якобы находится барашек. Как ни странно, именно этот вариант очень нравится малышу.

Краткое содержание «Маленького принца» будет неполным без описания главного героя. Мальчик с золотыми волосами живет на крохотной планете-астероиде размером с обычный дом и каждое утро борется с вредителями в виде ростков баобабов. Если их вовремя не прополоть — вырастут огромные деревья, которые разорвут планету. Раз в неделю трудолюбивый принц прочищает три вулкана, хотя один из них давно нерабочий.

Жизнь мальчика была одинокой, единственное развлечение ребенка — возможность любоваться закатом. Чтобы чаще смотреть на прекрасное зрелище, Маленький принц несколько раз в день перемещал свой стул, двигаясь за солнцем.

Еще одна обитательница планеты — роза, прекрасный цветок, который чудом занесло на астероид. За ней бережно и внимательно ухаживает Маленький принц. Содержание его внутреннего мира отчасти открывается через отношение к капризному растению. Мальчик искренне любит свою розу, а она в ответ постоянно манипулирует, вызывая то чувство вины, то раздражение и досаду.

Но со временем он понимает, что это наносное, и благодарен цветку за подаренную красоту и аромат. В итоге роза тоже признается принцу в любви, но лишь перед тем, как тот покинет свою планету.

Пересказывая краткое содержание книги «Маленький принц», нужно обратить внимание на персонажей, которых герой встречает во время путешествия по другим мирам. Мальчик посещает шесть соседних планет и знакомится их обитателями. Это взрослые люди, у них странные привычки, образ жизни и интересы, чему искренне удивляется Маленький принц.

Краткое содержание для читательского дневника не может обойтись без характеристики этих образов:

• Король. Монарх одет в мантию из горностая и восседает на троне, занимая почти всю площадь астероида. Его дело — повелевать, он отдает приказы и ждет подчинения. Король предлагает Маленькому принцу должность министра, но тот быстро покидает планету.
• Честолюбец. Он постоянно носит шляпу, чтобы было чем раскланиваться в ответ на приветствия восторженных почитателей, которые почему-то никак не появляются.
• Пьяница. Этот человек все время пьет и испытывает из-за пьянства чувство стыда. А чтобы не было мучительно стыдно, вновь тянется за бутылкой.
• Деловой человек. Серьезный мужчина средних лет постоянно считает звезды, полагая, что от их количества зависит его богатство. Его цель — приумножить капитал, чтобы покупать новые звезды, когда их откроют.
• Фонарщик. Он вызвал симпатию Маленького принца, так как занят полезным делом и освещает планету в темное время суток. Но трагедия фонарщика в том, что его планета вращается слишком быстро — зажигать и гасить свет приходится каждую минуту. Но он не оставляет свой пост и поэтому нравится принцу.
• Географ. Старый ученый составляет карты и записывает рассказы путешественников, но только после того, как проверит их репутацию. Маленький принц хочет рассказать о своем цветке. Географ объясняет, что ему интересны только вечные океаны и неизменные горы, а жизнь цветов слишком коротка. Принц понимает, что его роза может скоро исчезнуть, оставшись одна без ухода и помощи. Географ советует мальчику посетить планету Земля: у нее неплохая репутация.

Читайте также: «Гранатовый браслет»: краткое содержание и анализ произведения

Маленький принц прилетает на Землю и оказывается в пустыне. Поначалу он думает, что ошибся планетой, но вскоре знакомится со змеей, и та рассказывает, что Земля большая и красивая. Змея предупреждает мальчика, что и среди людей бывает одиноко, и предлагает свою помощь, если он захочет вернуться на астероид.

Описывая книгу «Маленький принц» в сокращении, стоит упомянуть события, произошедшие с героем за год, проведенный на Земле:

• Мальчик видит горы и забирается на самый верх в надежде оттуда увидеть людей. Сидя на вершине скалы, он задает вопросы, но в ответ слышит лишь эхо.
• Очутившись в саду, Маленький принц видит тысячи роз. Он сильно разочарован: выходит, любимая красавица — самый обычный цветок, и на его планете нет ничего особенного.
• Принц встречается с Лисом, и тот просит, чтобы его приручили. Лис говорит принцу, что зорко видеть может только сердце. Они становятся друзьями, и теперь мальчик понимает, почему ему настолько дорога роза. Также он осознает, что несет ответственность за цветок и ему нужно вернуться домой.
• Принц встречает торговца, который продает таблетки от жажды. Если не пить, можно сэкономить пятьдесят три минуты в день и делать в это время что захочешь. Принц решает, что если бы у него было пятьдесят три свободные минуты, он бы просто пошел к роднику.

Проведя неделю с летчиком и поведав ему свой краткий пересказ, Маленький принц решает отправиться на свою планету. Он многое узнал и понял, теперь пора возвращаться к розе, вулканам и продолжать выпалывать баобабы, иначе они разрушат крохотный мир. Мальчик договаривается со змеей, чтобы та его укусила и помогла покинуть Землю. В день, когда астероид находится над пустыней, Маленький принц улетает домой.

Летчик чинит самолет и возвращается на родину. Он грустит о Маленьком принце, но со временем находит утешение, слушая по ночам звезды:

Весь мир становится для нас иным оттого, что где-то в безвестном уголке Вселенной барашек, которого мы никогда не видели, быть может, съел незнакомую нам розу…

Взгляните на небо. И спросите себя: жива ли та роза или ее уже нет? Вдруг барашек ее съел? И вы увидите: все станет по-другому…И никогда ни один взрослый не поймет, как это важно!

«Маленький принц»: анализ произведения

Рассказ «Маленький принц» написан в 1942 году, в разгар Второй мировой войны. В этот период Сент-Экзюпери много размышлял о судьбе мира и будущем человечества, над которым нависла угроза фашизма.

Также он видел, что современники все реже задумываются о духовных ценностях, ставя во главу угла материальные блага. Размышления над философскими и этическими проблемами и воспоминания об инциденте в Ливийской пустыне вылились в повесть «Маленький принц».

О чем эта книга? В первую очередь о смысле жизни, который ищет Маленький принц, путешествуя по планетам. Он сталкивается с жителями астероидов, каждый из которых замкнулся не только в своем объективно крохотном мирке, но и в собственных границах.

В гротескной форме автор показывает отрицательные черты и пороки, свойственные многим людям. Жажда власти, тщеславие, пьянство, стяжательство и погоня за бессмысленным богатством — все это, увиденное глазами Маленького принца, предстает в самом неприглядном свете.

На этом фоне актуализируется вопрос о том, что же действительно ценно, на что не жаль тратить свое время и жизнь? Автор поднимает тему любви и дружбы, которые занимают центральное место в повести «Маленький принц». Сюжет этой сказочной притчи состоит из двух линий:

• истории летчика, которая связывает с привычным миром взрослых;
• приключений принца, который открывает для себя реальность и учится понимать жизнь.

Маленький принц знает, что такое любовь и привязанность, — он ухаживает за своим цветком и переживает, когда роза притворяется больной или капризничает. Мальчик понимает, что нужно заботиться о планете, поэтому каждое утро трудится, выпалывая опасные ростки баобабов. Но понять глубокую суть любви и ответственности он может, только столкнувшись с реалиями Земли.

Встретив на своем пути сад с тысячами роз, принц поначалу обесценивает свой цветок. Но знакомство с Лисом меняет его взгляд на вещи: не имеет значения, сколько в мире существует роз, если этот цветок особенный. «Твоя роза дорога тебе потому, что ты отдавал ей все свои дни, — говорит Лис, а потом произносит: Не забывай: ты навсегда в ответе за всех, кого приручил. Ты в ответе за свою розу».

Лис рассказывает мальчику, что не стоит доверять глазам: по-настоящему зорко лишь сердце. Перед расставанием новый друг признается, что будет грустить о принце, но теперь полюбит спелые колосья пшеницы, потому что они напоминают золотые волосы мальчика.Таким образом, автор показывает, как сквозь призму искреннего чувства можно видеть и по-настоящему ценить красоту мира.

Еще один аллегорический образ — змея, первая, кого принц повстречал на Земле. Она рассказывает мальчику об одиночестве среди людей, предсказывая будущее разочарование, и намекает на свое могущество. Так принц впервые встречается со смертью. И хотя впоследствии он познакомится с Лисом и летчиком, которые станут ему друзьями, именно к змее он вернется, чтобы попасть домой и снова заботиться о розе и своей планете.

Образ всезнающей змеи и необходимость покинуть физическое тело для возвращения в небесный дом вызывают ассоциации с библейскими образами. Выбор в качестве места действия пустыни также глубоко символичен: здесь нет ничего лишнего, жизнь словно застыла, оставив героев наедине с вечностью.

Чтобы оценить тонкость и глубокий смысл произведения, стоит выделить немного времени на знакомство с удивительной повестью «Маленький принц». Читать ее совсем недолго, но мысли-истины, вложенные автором в уста маленького мальчика и его друзей, неслучайно разошлись на цитаты.

В простой и лаконичной форме Экзюпери говорит о главном — любви и добре, дружбе и милосердии. Автор напоминает, что каждое живое существо бесценно и неповторимо, как и быстротечные мгновения жизни. Сказка «Маленький принц», созданная во время самой страшной войны, стала своеобразным гуманистическим манифестом, который находит отклик в сердцах людей по всему миру.

Читайте также: «Старик и море»: краткое содержание и анализ

Оригинал статьи: https://www.nur.kz/family/school/1850741-malenkij-princ-kratkoe-soderzanie-i-analiz/

This article is about the novella. For other uses, including films made from the book, see Little Prince.

The Little Prince

Author	Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Original title	Le Petit Prince
Translator	(English editions) Katherine Woods[1] Bonnie Greer[2] T.V.F. Cuffe[3] Michael Morpurgo[4] Irene Testot-Ferry[5] Alan Wakeman Janet Hill[6] David Wilkinson Gregory Norminton[7]
Illustrator	Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Cover artist	Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Country	France
Language	French
Publisher	Reynal & Hitchcock (U.S.) Gallimard (France)[8]
Publication date	April 1943 (U.S.: English & French) 1945 (France: French)[8][Note 1]
Awards	Le Monde’s 100 Books of the Century
Preceded by	Pilote de guerre (1942)
Followed by	Lettre à un otage [fr] (1944)

The Little Prince (French: Le Petit Prince, pronounced [lə p(ə)ti pʁɛ̃s]) is a novella by French aristocrat, writer, and military pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. It was first published in English and French in the United States by Reynal & Hitchcock in April 1943 and was published posthumously in France following liberation; Saint-Exupéry’s works had been banned by the Vichy Regime. The story follows a young prince who visits various planets in space, including Earth, and addresses themes of loneliness, friendship, love, and loss. Despite its style as a children’s book, The Little Prince makes observations about life, adults, and human nature.^[9]

The Little Prince became Saint-Exupéry’s most successful work, selling an estimated 140 million copies worldwide, which makes it one of the best-selling in history.^{[10][11][12][Note 2][14]} The book has been translated into over 505 different languages and dialects worldwide, being the second most translated work ever published, trailing only the Bible.^[15][16][17] The Little Prince has been adapted to numerous art forms and media, including audio recordings, radio plays, live stage, film, television, ballet, and opera.^[16][18]

Plot[edit]

The narrator begins with a discussion on the nature of grown-ups and their inability to perceive «important things». As a test to determine if a grown-up is as enlightened as a child, he shows them a picture depicting a boa constrictor which has eaten an elephant. The grown-ups always reply that the picture depicts a hat, and so he knows to only talk of «reasonable» things to them, rather than the fanciful.

The narrator becomes an aircraft pilot, and one day, his plane crashes in the Sahara desert, far from civilization. The narrator has an eight-day supply of water and must fix his aeroplane. Here, he is greeted unexpectedly by a young boy nicknamed «the little prince.» The prince has golden hair, a loveable laugh, and will repeat questions until they are answered.

The prince asks the narrator to draw a sheep. The narrator first shows him the picture of the elephant inside the snake, which, to the narrator’s surprise, the prince interprets correctly. After three failed attempts at drawing a sheep, the frustrated narrator draws a simple crate, claiming the sheep is inside. The prince exclaims that this was exactly the drawing he wanted.

Over the course of eight days in the desert, while the narrator attempts to repair his plane, the prince recounts his life story. He begins describing his tiny home planet: in effect, a house-sized asteroid known as «B 612» on Earth. The asteroid’s most prominent features are three minuscule volcanoes (two active, and one dormant or extinct) and a variety of plants.

The prince describes his earlier days cleaning the volcanoes and weeding unwanted seeds and sprigs that infest his planet’s soil; in particular, pulling out baobab trees that are constantly on the verge of overrunning the surface. If the baobabs are not rooted out the moment they are recognised, its roots can have a catastrophic effect on the tiny planet. Therefore, the prince wants a sheep to eat the undesirable plants, but worries it will also eat plants with thorns.

The prince tells of his love for a vain and silly rose that began growing on the asteroid’s surface some time ago. The rose is given to pretension, exaggerating ailments to gain attention and have the prince care for her. The prince says he nourished the rose and tended to her, making a screen and glass globe to protect her from the cold and wind, watering her, and keeping the caterpillars off.

Although the prince fell in love with the rose, he also began to feel that she was taking advantage of him, and he resolved to leave the planet to explore the rest of the universe. Upon their goodbyes, the rose apologises for failing to show that she loved him. She wishes him well and turns down his desire to leave her in the glass globe, saying she will protect herself. The prince laments that he did not understand how to love his rose while he was with her and should have listened to her kind actions, rather than her vain words.

The prince has since visited six other planets, each of which was inhabited by a single, irrational, narrow-minded adult, each meant to critique an element of society. They include:

• A king with no subjects, who only issues orders that can’t be followed, such as commanding the sun to set at sunset.
• A conceited man who only wants the praise which comes from admiration and being the most-admirable person on his otherwise uninhabited planet.
• A drunkard who drinks to forget the shame of drinking.
• A businessman who is blind to the beauty of the stars and instead endlessly counts and catalogues them in order to «own» them all (critiquing materialism).
• A lamplighter on a planet so small, a full day lasts a minute. He wastes his life blindly following orders to extinguish and relight the lamp-post every 30 seconds to correspond with his planet’s day and night.
• An elderly geographer who has never been anywhere, or seen any of the things he records, providing a caricature of specialisation in the contemporary world.

It is the geographer who tells the prince that his rose is an ephemeral being, which is not recorded, and recommends that the prince next visit the planet Earth. The visit to Earth begins with a deeply pessimistic appraisal of humanity. The six absurd people the prince encountered earlier comprise, according to the narrator, just about the entire adult world. On earth there were:

111 kings … 7,000 geographers, 900,000 businessmen, 7,500,000 tipplers, 311,000,000 conceited men; that is to say, about 2,000,000,000 grown-ups.

Since the prince landed in a desert, he believed that Earth was uninhabited. He then met a yellow snake that claimed to have the power to return him to his home, if he ever wished to return. The prince next met a desert flower, who told him that she had only seen a handful of men in this part of the world and that they had no roots, letting the wind blow them around and living hard lives. After climbing the highest mountain he had ever seen, the prince hoped to see the whole of Earth, thus finding the people; however, he saw only the enormous, desolate landscape. When the prince called out, his echo answered him, which he interpreted as the voice of a boring person who only repeats what another says.

The prince encountered a whole row of rosebushes, becoming downcast at having once thought that his own rose was unique and thinking his rose had lied about being unique. He began to feel that he was not a great prince at all, as his planet contained only three tiny volcanoes and a flower that he now thought of as common. He laid down on the grass and wept, until a fox came along.

The fox desired to be tamed and taught the prince how to tame him. By being tamed, something goes from being ordinary and just like all the others to being special and unique. There are drawbacks since the connection can lead to sadness and longing when apart.

From the fox, the prince learns that his rose was indeed unique and special because she was the object of the prince’s love and time; he had «tamed» her, and now she was more precious than all of the roses he had seen in the garden. Upon their sad departing, the fox imparts a secret: important things can only be seen with the heart, not the eyes.

The prince finally met two people from Earth:

• A railway switchman who told him how passengers constantly rushed from one place to another aboard trains, never satisfied with where they were and not knowing what they were after; only the children among them ever bothered to look out the windows.
• A merchant who talked to the prince about his product, a pill that eliminated the need to drink for a week, saving people 53 minutes.

Back in the present moment, it is the eighth day after the narrator’s plane crash and the narrator and the prince are dying of thirst. The prince has become visibly morose and saddened over his recollections and longs to return home and see his flower.

The prince finds a well, saving them. The narrator later finds the prince talking to the snake, discussing his return home and his desire to see his rose again, who, he worries, has been left to fend for herself. The prince bids an emotional farewell to the narrator and states that if it looks as though he has died, it is only because his body was too heavy to take with him to his planet. The prince warns the narrator not to watch him leave, as it will upset him. The narrator, realising what will happen, refuses to leave the prince’s side. The prince consoles the narrator by saying that he only need look at the stars to think of the prince’s loveable laughter, and that it will seem as if all the stars are laughing. The prince then walks away from the narrator and allows the snake to bite him, soundlessly falling down.

The next morning, the narrator is unable to find the prince’s body. He finally manages to repair his aeroplane and leave the desert. It is left up to the reader to determine if the prince returned home or died. The story ends with a drawing of the landscape where the prince and the narrator met and where the snake took the prince’s corporeal life. The narrator requests to be immediately contacted by anyone in that area encountering a small person with golden curls who refuses to answer any questions.

Tone and writing style[edit]

The story of The Little Prince is recalled in a sombre, measured tone by the pilot-narrator, in memory of his small friend, «a memorial to the prince—not just to the prince, but also to the time the prince and the narrator had together.»^[19] The Little Prince was created when Saint-Exupéry was «an ex-patriate and distraught about what was going on in his country and in the world.»^[14] According to one analysis, «the story of the Little Prince features a lot of fantastical, unrealistic elements…. You can’t ride a flock of birds to another planet… The fantasy of the Little Prince works because the logic of the story is based on the imagination of children, rather than the strict realism of adults.»^[20]

An exquisite literary perfectionist, akin to the 19th century French poet Stéphane Mallarmé,^[21] Saint-Exupéry produced draft pages «covered with fine lines of handwriting, much of it painstakingly crossed out, with one word left standing where there were a hundred words, one sentence substitut[ing] for a page…»^[22] He worked «long hours with great concentration.» According to the author himself, it was extremely difficult to start his creative writing processes.^[23] Biographer Paul Webster wrote of the aviator-author’s style: «Behind Saint-Exupéry’s quest for perfection was a laborious process of editing and rewriting which reduced original drafts by as much as two-thirds.»^[24] The French author frequently wrote at night, usually starting at about 11 p.m. accompanied by a tray of strong black coffee. In 1942 Saint-Exupéry related to his American English teacher, Adèle Breaux, that at such a time of night he felt «free» and able to concentrate, «writing for hours without feeling tired or sleepy», until he instantaneously dozed off.^[22] He would wake up later, in daylight, still at his desk, with his head on his arms. Saint-Exupéry stated it was the only way he could work, as once he started a writing project it became an obsession.^[25]

While Saint-Exupéry was a native speaker of French, he was never able to achieve anything more than haltingly poor English. Adèle Breaux, his young Northport English tutor to whom he later dedicated a writing («For Miss Adèle Breaux, who so gently guided me in the mysteries of the English language»), related her experiences with her famous student as Saint-Exupéry in America, 1942–1943: A Memoir, published in 1971.^[26]

«Saint-Exupéry’s prodigious writings and studies of literature sometimes gripped him, and on occasion he continued his readings of literary works until moments before take-off on solitary military reconnaissance flights, as he was adept at both reading and writing while flying. Taking off with an open book balanced on his leg, his ground crew would fear his mission would quickly end after contacting something ‘very hard’. On one flight, to the chagrin of colleagues awaiting his arrival, he circled the Tunis airport for an hour so that he could finish reading a novel. Saint-Exupéry frequently flew with a lined carnet (notebook) during his long, solo flights, and some of his philosophical writings were created during such periods when he could reflect on the world below him, becoming ‘enmeshed in a search for ideals which he translated into fable and parable’.»^[27][28]

Inspirations[edit]

Events and characters[edit]

In The Little Prince, its narrator, the pilot, talks of being stranded in the desert beside his crashed aircraft. The account clearly drew on Saint-Exupéry’s own experience in the Sahara, an ordeal described in detail in his 1939 memoir Wind, Sand and Stars (original French: Terre des hommes).^[9]

On 30 December 1935, at 02:45 am, after 19 hours and 44 minutes in the air, Saint-Exupéry, along with his copilot-navigator André Prévot, crashed in the Sahara desert.^[29] They were attempting to break the speed record for a Paris-to-Saigon flight in a then-popular type of air race called a raid, that had a prize of 150,000 francs.^[30] Their plane was a Caudron C-630 Simoun,^{[Note 3]} and the crash site is thought to have been near to the Wadi Natrun valley, close to the Nile Delta.^[31]

Both miraculously survived the crash, only to face rapid dehydration in the intense desert heat.^[32] Their maps were primitive and ambiguous. Lost among the sand dunes with a few grapes, a thermos of coffee, a single orange, and some wine, the pair had only one day’s worth of liquid. They both began to see mirages, which were quickly followed by more vivid hallucinations. By the second and third days, they were so dehydrated that they stopped sweating altogether. Finally, on the fourth day, a Bedouin on a camel discovered them and administered a native rehydration treatment, which saved Saint-Exupéry’s and Prévot’s lives.^[30]

In the novella, the fox, believed to be modeled after the author’s intimate New York City friend, Silvia Hamilton Reinhardt, tells the prince that his rose is unique and special, as she is the one he loves.^[33] The novella’s iconic phrase, «One sees clearly only with the heart» is believed to have been suggested by Reinhardt.

The fearsome, grasping baobab trees, researchers have contended, were meant to represent Nazism attempting to destroy the planet.^[33] The little prince’s reassurance to the pilot that the prince’s body is only an empty shell resembles the last words of Antoine’s dying younger brother François, who told the author, from his deathbed: «Don’t worry. I’m all right. I can’t help it. It’s my body».^[34]

Rose[edit]

Many researchers believe that the prince’s kindhearted, but petulant and vain, Rose was inspired by Saint-Exupéry’s Salvadoran wife Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry,^[33][35] with the small home planet being inspired by Guatemala where he crashed, broke multiple bones,^[36] and stayed to recover, surrounded with the view of 3 volcanoes.^[37] Despite a tumultuous marriage, Saint-Exupéry kept Consuelo close to his heart and portrayed her as the prince’s rose, whom he tenderly protects with a wind screen and places under a glass dome on his tiny planet. Saint-Exupéry’s infidelity and the doubts of his marriage are symbolized by the vast field of roses the prince encounters during his visit to Earth.^[9]

This interpretation was described by biographer Paul Webster who stated she was «the muse to whom Saint-Exupéry poured out his soul in copious letters … Consuelo was the rose in The Little Prince. «I should have judged her by her acts and not by her words», says the prince. «She wrapped herself around me and enlightened me. I should never have fled. I should have guessed at the tenderness behind her poor ruses.»^[24]

Prince[edit]

Saint-Exupéry probably has drawn inspiration for the prince’s character and appearance from his own self as a youth, as during his early years friends and family called him le Roi-Soleil («the Sun King») because of his golden curly hair. The author had also met a precocious eight-year-old with curly blond hair while he was residing with a family in Quebec City in 1942, Thomas De Koninck, the son of philosopher Charles De Koninck.^[38][39][40] Another possible inspiration for the little prince has been suggested as Land Morrow Lindbergh, the young, golden-haired son of fellow aviator Charles Lindbergh and his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, whom he met during an overnight stay at their Long Island home in 1939.^{[41][42][Note 4]}

Some have seen the prince as a Christ figure, as the child is sin-free and «believes in a life after death», subsequently returning to his personal heaven.^[43] When Life photojournalist John Phillips questioned the author-aviator on his inspiration for the child character, Saint-Exupéry told him that one day he looked down on what he thought was a blank sheet and saw a small childlike figure: «I asked him who he was», he replied. «I’m the Little Prince» was the reply.^[44]

One of Saint-Exupéry’s earliest literary references to a small prince is to be found in his second news dispatch from Moscow, dated 14 May 1935. In his writings as a special correspondent for Paris-Soir, the author described traveling from France to the Soviet Union by train. Late at night, during the trip, he ventured from his first-class accommodation into the third-class carriages, where he came upon large groups of Polish families huddled together, returning to their homeland. His commentary not only described a diminutive prince but also touched on several other themes Saint-Exupéry incorporated into various philosophical writings:^[45]

I sat down [facing a sleeping] couple. Between the man and the woman a child had hollowed himself out a place and fallen asleep. He turned in his slumber, and in the dim lamplight I saw his face. What an adorable face! A golden fruit had been born of these two peasants….. This is a musician’s face, I told myself. This is the child Mozart. This is a life full of beautiful promise. Little princes in legends are not different from this. Protected, sheltered, cultivated, what could not this child become? When by mutation a new rose is born in a garden, all gardeners rejoice. They isolate the rose, tend it, foster it. But there is no gardener for men. This little Mozart will be shaped like the rest by the common stamping machine…. This little Mozart is condemned.

— A Sense of Life: En Route to the U.S.S.R.

Background[edit]

Upon the outbreak of the Second World War, a laureate of several of France’s highest literary awards and a successful pioneering aviator prior to the war, Saint-Exupéry initially flew with a reconnaissance squadron as a reserve military pilot in the Armée de l’Air (French Air Force).^[9] After France’s defeat in 1940 and its armistice with Germany, he and Consuelo fled Occupied France and sojourned in North America, with Saint-Exupéry first arriving by himself at the very end of December 1940. His intention for the visit was to convince the United States to quickly enter the war against Nazi Germany and the Axis forces, and he soon became one of the expatriate voices of the French Resistance. In the midst of personal upheavals and failing health, he produced almost half of the writings for which he would be remembered, including a tender tale of loneliness, friendship, love and loss, in the form of a young prince visiting Earth.^[46]

An earlier memoir by the author recounted his aviation experiences in the Sahara, and he is thought to have drawn on the same experiences as plot elements in The Little Prince.

He wrote and illustrated the manuscript during the summer and fall of 1942. Although greeted warmly by French-speaking Americans and by fellow expatriates who had preceded him in New York, his 27-month stay would be marred by health problems and racked with periods of severe stress, martial and marital strife. These included partisan attacks on the author’s neutral stance towards supporters of both ardent French Gaullist and Vichy France.^[47] Saint-Exupéry’s American translator (the author spoke poor English) wrote: «He was restless and unhappy in exile, seeing no way to fight again for his country and refusing to take part in the political quarrels that set Frenchman against Frenchman.»^[22] However, the period was to be both a «dark but productive time» during which he created three important works.^[48]

Between January 1941 and April 1943, the Saint-Exupérys lived in two penthouse apartments on Central Park South,^[49] then the Bevin House mansion in Asharoken, New York, and still later at a rented house on Beekman Place in New York City.^[50][51]

The couple also stayed in Quebec for five weeks during the late spring of 1942, where they met a precocious eight-year-old boy with blond curly hair, Thomas, the son of philosopher Charles De Koninck, with whom the Saint-Exupérys resided.^{[52][53][54][55]} During an earlier visit to Long Island in August 1939, Saint-Exupéry had also met Land Morrow Lindbergh, the young, golden-haired son of the pioneering American aviator Charles Lindbergh and his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh.^[41][42]

After returning to the US from his Quebec speaking tour, Saint-Exupéry was pressed to work on a children’s book by Elizabeth Reynal, one of the wives of his US publisher, Reynal & Hitchcock. The French wife of Eugene Reynal had closely observed Saint-Exupéry for several months, and noting his ill health and high stress levels, she suggested to him that working on a children’s story would help.^{[56][Note 5]} The author wrote and illustrated The Little Prince at various locations in New York City but principally in the Long Island north-shore community of Asharoken in mid-to-late 1942, with the manuscript being completed in October.^[51][52][52]

Although the book was started in his Central Park South penthouse, Saint-Exupéry soon found New York City’s noise and sweltering summer heat too uncomfortable to work in and so Consuelo was dispatched to find improved accommodations. After spending some time at an unsuitable clapboard country house in Westport, Connecticut,^[57] they found Bevin House, a 22-room mansion in Asharoken that overlooked Long Island Sound. The author-aviator initially complained, «I wanted a hut, and it’s the Palace of Versailles.»^[46] As the weeks wore on, the author became invested in his project and the home would become «a haven for writing, the best place I have ever had anywhere in my life.»^[58] He devoted himself to the book on mostly midnight shifts,^[22] usually starting at about 11 pm, fueled by helpings of scrambled eggs on English muffins, gin and tonics, Coca-Colas, cigarettes and numerous visits by friends and expatriates who dropped in to see their famous countryman. One of the visitors was his wife’s Swiss writer paramour Denis de Rougemont, who also modeled for a painting of the Little Prince lying on his stomach, feet and arms extended up in the air.^[46][51] De Rougemont would later help Consuelo write her autobiography, The Tale of the Rose, as well as write his own biography of Saint-Exupéry.

While the author’s personal life was frequently chaotic, his creative process while writing was disciplined. Christine Nelson, curator of literary and historical manuscripts at the Morgan Library and Museum which had obtained Saint-Exupéry’s original manuscript in 1968, stated: «On the one hand, he had a clear vision for the shape, tone, and message of the story. On the other hand, he was ruthless about chopping out entire passages that just weren’t quite right», eventually distilling the 30,000 word manuscript, accompanied by small illustrations and sketches, to approximately half its original length.^[59] The story, the curator added, was created when he was «an ex-patriate and distraught about what was going on in his country and in the world.»^[14]

The large white Second French Empire-style mansion, hidden behind tall trees, afforded the writer a multitude of work environments, but he usually wrote at a large dining table.^[22] It also allowed him to alternately work on his writings and then on his sketches and watercolours for hours at a time, moving his armchair and paint easel from the library towards the parlor one room at a time in search of sunlight. His meditative view of sunsets at the Bevin House were incorporated in the book, where the prince visits a small planet with 43 daily sunsets, a planet where all that is needed to watch a sunset «is move your chair a few steps.»^{[46][51][Note 6]}

Manuscript[edit]

The original 140-page autograph manuscript of The Little Prince, along with various drafts and trial drawings, were acquired from the author’s close friend Silvia Hamilton in 1968 by curator Herbert Cahoon of the Pierpont Morgan Library (now The Morgan Library & Museum) in Manhattan, New York City.^[11][60][61] It is the only known surviving handwritten draft of the complete work.^[62] The manuscript’s pages include large amounts of the author’s prose that was struck-through and therefore not published as part of the first edition. In addition to the manuscript, several watercolour illustrations by the author are also held by the museum. They were not part of the first edition. The institution has marked both the 50th and 70th anniversaries of the novella’s publication, along with the centenary celebration of the author’s birth, with major exhibitions of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s literary works.^[33][63] Physically, the manuscript’s onion skin media has become brittle and subject to damage. Saint-Exupéry’s handwriting is described as being doctor-like, verging on indecipherable.^[64]

The story’s keynote aphorism, On ne voit bien qu’avec le cœur. L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux («One sees clearly only with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye») was reworded and rewritten some 15 times before achieving its final phrasing. Saint-Exupéry also used a Dictaphone recorder to produce oral drafts for his typist.^[22][60] His initial 30,000-word working manuscript was distilled to less than half its original size through laborious editing sessions. Multiple versions of its many pages were created and its prose then polished over several drafts, with the author occasionally telephoning friends at 2:00 a.m. to solicit opinions on his newly written passages.^[22]

Many pages and illustrations were cut from the finished work as he sought to maintain a sense of ambiguity to the story’s theme and messages. Included among the deletions in its 17th chapter were references to locales in New York, such as the Rockefeller Center and Long Island. Other deleted pages described the prince’s vegetarian diet and the garden on his home asteroid that included beans, radishes, potatoes and tomatoes, but which lacked fruit trees that might have overwhelmed the prince’s planetoid. Deleted chapters discussed visits to other asteroids occupied by a retailer brimming with marketing phrases, and an inventor whose creation could produce any object desired at a touch of its controls. Likely the result of the ongoing war in Europe weighing on Saint-Exupéry’s shoulders, the author produced a sombre three-page epilogue lamenting «On one star someone has lost a friend, on another someone is ill, on another someone is at war…», with the story’s pilot-narrator noting of The Prince: «he sees all that. . . . For him, the night is hopeless. And for me, his friend, the night is also hopeless.» The draft epilogue was also omitted from the novella’s printing.^[60]

Further information: Morgan exhibitions

In April 2012 a Parisian auction house announced the discovery of two previously unknown draft manuscript pages that included new text.^[10][65] In the newly discovered material the Prince meets his first Earthling after his arrival. The person he meets is an «ambassador of the human spirit».^[10][65] The ambassador is too busy to talk, saying he is searching for a missing six letter word: «I am looking for a six-letter word that starts with G that means ‘gargling’ «, he says. Saint-Exupéry’s text does not say what the word is, but experts believe it could be «guerre» (or «war»). The novella thus takes a more politicized tack with an anti-war sentiment, as ‘to gargle’ in French is an informal reference to ‘honour’, which the author may have viewed as a key factor in military confrontations between nations.^[65][66]

Dedication[edit]

Saint-Exupéry met Léon Werth (1878–1955), a writer and art critic, in 1931. Werth soon became Saint-Exupery’s closest friend outside of his Aeropostale associates. Werth was an anarchist, a leftist Bolshevik supporter of Jewish descent, twenty-two years older than Saint-Exupéry.

Saint-Exupéry dedicated two books to him, Lettre à un otage [fr] (Letter to a Hostage) and Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince), and referred to Werth in three more of his works. At the beginning of the Second World War while writing The Little Prince, Saint-Exupéry lived in his downtown New York City apartment, thinking of his native France and his friends. Werth spent the war unobtrusively in Saint-Amour, his village in the Jura, a mountainous region near Switzerland where he was «alone, cold and hungry», a place that had few polite words for French refugees. Werth appears in the preamble to the novella, where Saint-Exupéry dedicates the book to him:^[67]

To Leon Werth

I ask children to forgive me for dedicating this book to a grown-up. I have a serious excuse: this grown-up is the best friend I have in the world. I have another excuse: this grown-up can understand everything, even books for children. I have a third excuse: he lives in France where he is hungry and cold. He needs to be comforted. If all these excuses are not enough then I want to dedicate this book to the child whom this grown-up once was. All grown-ups were children first. (But few of them remember it.) So I correct my dedication:

To Leon Werth,

When he was a little boy

Saint-Exupéry’s aircraft disappeared over the Mediterranean in July 1944. The following month, Werth learned of his friend’s disappearance from a radio broadcast. Without having yet heard of The Little Prince, in November, Werth discovered that Saint-Exupéry had published a fable the previous year in the U.S., which he had illustrated himself, and that it was dedicated to him.^[68] At the end of the Second World War, which Antoine de Saint-Exupéry did not live to see, Werth said: «Peace, without Tonio (Saint-Exupéry) isn’t entirely peace.» Werth did not see the text for which he was so responsible until five months after his friend’s death, when Saint-Exupéry’s French publisher, Gallimard, sent him a special edition. Werth died in Paris in 1955.

Illustrations[edit]

All of the novella’s simple but elegant watercolour illustrations, which were integral to the story, were painted by Saint-Exupéry. He had studied architecture as a young adult but nevertheless could not be considered an artist – which he self-mockingly alluded to in the novella’s introduction. Several of his illustrations were painted on the wrong side of the delicate onion skin paper that he used, his medium of choice.^[51] As with some of his draft manuscripts, he occasionally gave away preliminary sketches to close friends and colleagues; others were even recovered as crumpled balls from the floors in the cockpits he flew.^{[Note 7]} Two or three original Little Prince drawings were reported in the collections of New York artist, sculptor and experimental filmmaker Joseph Cornell.^[69] One rare original Little Prince watercolour would be mysteriously sold at a second-hand book fair in Japan in 1994, and subsequently authenticated in 2007.^[70][71]

An unrepentant lifelong doodler and sketcher, Saint-Exupéry had for many years sketched little people on his napkins, tablecloths, letters to paramours and friends, lined notebooks and other scraps of paper.^[44][46] Early figures took on a multitude of appearances, engaged in a variety of tasks. Some appeared as doll-like figures, baby puffins, angels with wings, and even a figure similar to that in Robert Crumb’s later famous Keep On Truckin’ of 1968. In a 1940 letter to a friend he sketched a character with his own thinning hair, sporting a bow tie, viewed as a boyish alter-ego, and he later gave a similar doodle to Elizabeth Reynal at his New York publisher’s office.^[44] Most often the diminutive figure was expressed as «…a slip of a boy with a turned up nose, lots of hair, long baggy pants that were too short for him and with a long scarf that whipped in the wind. Usually the boy had a puzzled expression… [T]his boy Saint-Exupéry came to think of as «the little prince», and he was usually found standing on top of a tiny planet. Most of the time he was alone, sometimes walking up a path. Sometimes there was a single flower on the planet.»^[57] His characters were frequently seen chasing butterflies; when asked why they did so, Saint-Exupéry, who thought of the figures as his alter-egos, replied that they were actually pursuing a «realistic ideal».^[46] Saint-Exupéry eventually settled on the image of the young, precocious child with curly blond hair, an image which would become the subject of speculations as to its source. One «most striking» illustration depicted the pilot-narrator asleep beside his stranded plane prior to the prince’s arrival. Although images of the narrator were created for the story, none survived Saint-Exupéry’s editing process.^[14]

To mark both the 50th and 70th anniversaries of The Little Prince’s publication, the Morgan Library and Museum mounted major exhibitions of Saint-Exupéry’s draft manuscript, preparatory drawings, and similar materials that it had obtained earlier from a variety of sources. One major source was an intimate friend of his in New York City, Silvia Hamilton (later, Reinhardt), to whom the author gave his working manuscript just prior to returning to Algiers to resume his work as a Free French Air Force pilot.^[33][63][72] Hamilton’s black poodle, Mocha, is believed to have been the model for the Little Prince’s sheep, with a Raggedy Ann type doll helping as a stand-in for the prince.^[62] Additionally, a pet boxer, Hannibal, that Hamilton gave to him as a gift may have been the model for the story’s desert fox and its tiger.^[48] A museum representative stated that the novella’s final drawings were lost.^[33]

Seven unpublished drawings for the book were also displayed at the museum’s exhibit, including fearsome looking baobab trees ready to destroy the prince’s home asteroid, as well as a picture of the story’s narrator, the forlorn pilot, sleeping next to his aircraft. That image was likely omitted to avoid giving the story a ‘literalness’ that would distract its readers, according to one of the Morgan Library’s staff.^[33] According to Christine Nelson, curator of literary and historical manuscripts at the Morgan, «[t]he image evokes Saint-Exupéry’s own experience of awakening in an isolated, mysterious place. You can almost imagine him wandering without much food and water and conjuring up the character of the Little Prince.»^[14] Another reviewer noted that the author «chose the best illustrations… to maintain the ethereal tone he wanted his story to exude. Choosing between ambiguity and literal text and illustrations, Saint-Exupéry chose in every case to obfuscate.»^[73] Not a single drawing of the story’s narrator–pilot survived the author’s editing process; «he was very good at excising what was not essential to his story».^[14]

In 2001 Japanese researcher Yoshitsugu Kunugiyama surmised that the cover illustration Saint-Exupéry painted for Le Petit Prince deliberately depicted a stellar arrangement created to celebrate the author’s own centennial of birth. According to Kunugiyama, the cover art chosen from one of Saint-Exupéry’s watercolour illustrations contained the planets Saturn and Jupiter, plus the star Aldebaran, arranged as an isosceles triangle, a celestial configuration which occurred in the early 1940s, and which he likely knew would next reoccur in the year 2000.^[74] Saint-Exupéry possessed superior mathematical skills and was a master celestial navigator, a vocation he had studied at Salon-de-Provence with the Armée de l’Air (French Air Force).

Post-publication[edit]

Stacy Schiff, one of Saint-Exupéry’s principal biographers, wrote of him and his most famous work, «rarely have an author and a character been so intimately bound together as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and his Little Prince», and remarking of their dual fates, «the two remain tangled together, twin innocents who fell from the sky».^[75] Another noted that the novella’s mystique was «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.»^[76]

Only weeks after his novella was first published in April 1943, despite his wife’s pleadings and before Saint-Exupéry had received any of its royalties (he never would), the author-aviator joined the Free French Forces. He would remain immensely proud of The Little Prince, and almost always kept a personal copy with him which he often read to others during the war.^[75]

As part of a 32 ship military convoy he voyaged to North Africa where he rejoined his old squadron to fight with the Allies, resuming his work as a reconnaissance pilot despite the best efforts of his friends, colleagues and fellow airmen who could not prevent him from flying.^{[Note 8]} He had previously escaped death by the barest of margins a number of times, but was then lost in action during a July 1944 spy mission from the moonscapes of Corsica to the continent in preparation for the Allied invasion of occupied France, only three weeks before the Liberation of Paris.^{[46][Note 9]}

Reception[edit]

Many of the book’s initial reviewers were flummoxed by the fable’s multi-layered story line and its morals,^[9] perhaps expecting a significantly more conventional story from one of France’s leading writers. Its publisher had anticipated such reactions to a work that fell neither exclusively into a children’s nor adult’s literature classification. The New York Times reviewer wrote shortly before its publication «What makes a good children’s book? … The Little Prince, which is a fascinating fable for grown-ups [is] of conjectural value for boys and girls of 6, 8 and 10. [It] may very well be a book on the order of Gulliver’s Travels, something that exists on two levels»; «Can you clutter up a narrative with paradox and irony and still hold the interest of 8 and 10-year olds?» Notwithstanding the story’s duality, the review added that major portions of the story would probably still «capture the imagination of any child.»^[79] Addressing whether it was written for children or adults, Reynal & Hitchcock promoted it ambiguously, saying that as far as they were concerned «it’s the new book by Saint-Exupéry», adding to its dustcover «There are few stories which in some way, in some degree, change the world forever for their readers. This is one.»^[60]

Others were not shy in offering their praise. Austin Stevens, also of The New York Times, stated that the story possessed «…large portions of the Saint-Exupéry philosophy and poetic spirit. In a way it’s a sort of credo.»^[57] P.L. Travers, author of the Mary Poppins series of children books, wrote in a New York Herald Tribune review: «The Little Prince will shine upon children with a sidewise gleam. It will strike them in some place that is not the mind and glow there until the time comes for them to comprehend it.»^[60][80]

British journalist Neil Clark, in The American Conservative in 2009, offered an expansive view of Saint-Exupéry’s overall work by commenting that it provides a «…bird’s eye view of humanity [and] contains some of the most profound observations on the human condition ever written», and that the author’s novella «doesn’t merely express his contempt for selfishness and materialism [but] shows how life should be lived.»^[81]

The book enjoyed modest initial success, residing on The New York Times Best Seller list for only two weeks,^[64] as opposed to his earlier 1939 English translation, Wind, Sand and Stars which remained on the same list for nearly five months.^[44] As a cultural icon, the novella regularly draws new readers and reviewers, selling almost two million copies annually and also spawning numerous adaptations. Modern-day references to The Little Prince include one from The New York Times that describes it as «abstract» and «fabulistic».^[63]

Literary translations and printed editions[edit]

As of April 2017,^[82] The Little Prince became the world’s most translated non-religious book (into 300 languages) together with Italian novel The Adventures of Pinocchio.

Katherine Woods (1886–1968)^[83] produced the first English translation of 1943, which was later joined by several other English translations. Her translation contained some errors.^[84][85] Mistranslations aside, one reviewer noted that Wood’s almost «poetic» English translation has long been admired by many Little Prince lovers, who have spanned generations (it stayed in print until 2001), as her work maintains Saint-Exupéry’s story-telling spirit and charm, if not its literal accuracy.^[73] As of 2019 at least seven additional English translations have been published:^[86]

• Irene Testot-Ferry, (ISBN 0-7567-5189-6, 1st ed. 1995)
• T.V.F. Cuffe, (ISBN 0-14-118562-7, 1st ed. 1995)
• Alan Wakeman, (ISBN 1-86205-066-X, 1st ed. 1995)^[87]
• Richard Howard, (ISBN 0-15-204804-9, 1st ed. 2000)^[6]
• Ros and Chloe Schwartz, (ISBN 9781907360015, 1st ed. 2010)^[88]
• David Wilkinson, (bilingual English-French student edition, ISBN 0-9567215-9-1, 1st ed. 2011)
• Michael Morpurgo, (ISBN 978-1784874179, 1st ed. 2018)
• Guillain Méjane, (translated via the PoesIA project, a convolutional neural network, ISBN 9798621081355, 1st ed. 2020)

The Little Prince was also translated by Bonnie Greer for a BBC radio adaptation in 1999.

• Bonnie Greer, BBC Radio 4, broadcast 25 December 1999.^[2]

Each translation approaches the essence of the original with an individual style and focus.^[89][90]

Le Petit Prince is often used as a beginner’s book for French-language students, and several bilingual and trilingual translations have been published. As of 2017, it has been translated into more than 300 languages and dialects, including Sardinian,^[91] the constructed international languages of Esperanto and Klingon, and the Congolese language Alur, as well as being printed in Braille for blind readers. It is also often used as an introduction into endangered varieties with very few speakers like Maya (2001), Aromanian (2006) or Banat Bulgarian (2017). It is one of the few modern books to have been translated into Latin, as Regulus, vel Pueri soli sapiunt^[92][93] in 1961 by Auguste Haury (1910–2002) and as Regulus in 2010 by Alexander Winkler. In 2005, the book was also translated into Toba Qom, an indigenous language of northern Argentina, as So Shiyaxauolec Nta’a. It was the first book translated into that language since the New Testament. It was also translated to a northern Italian dialect, Vogherese. Anthropologist Florence Tola, commenting on the suitability of the work for Toban translation, said there is «nothing strange [when] the Little Prince speaks with a snake or a fox and travels among the stars, it fits perfectly into the Toba mythology».^[94]

Linguists have compared the many translations and even editions of the same translation for style, composition, titles, wordings and genealogy. As an example: as of 2011 there are approximately 47 translated editions of The Little Prince in Korean,^{[Note 10]} and there are also about 50 different translated editions in Chinese (produced in both mainland China and Taiwan). Many of them are titled Prince From a Star, while others carry the book title that is a direct translation of The Little Prince.^[96] By studying the use of word phrasings, nouns, mistranslations and other content in newer editions, linguists can identify the source material for each version: whether it was derived from the original French typescript, or from its first translation into English by Katherine Woods, or from a number of adapted sources.^[73][97]

The first edition to be published in France, Saint-Exupéry’s birthplace, was printed by his regular publisher in that country, Gallimard, only after^[8] the German occupation of France ended.^{[98][Note 11]} Prior to France’s liberation new printings of Saint-Exupéry’s works were made available only by means of secret print runs,^[100][101] such as that of February 1943 when 1,000 copies of an underground version of his best seller Pilote de guerre, describing the German invasion of France, were covertly printed in Lyon.^[102]

Commemorating the novella’s 70th anniversary of publication, in conjunction with the 2014 Morgan Exhibition, Éditions Gallimard released a complete facsimile edition of Saint-Exupéry’s original handwritten manuscript entitled Le Manuscrit du Petit Prince d’Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: Facsimilé et Transcription, edited by Alban Cerisier and Delphine Lacroix. The book in its final form has also been republished in 70th anniversary editions by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (in English) and by Gallimard (in French).^[62]

A Portuguese translation of the novella in 2007, edited by Eidouro Gráfica e Editora Ltda and presented at the XIII Biannual Book Fair of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, holds the Guinness World Record for world’s largest book published.^[103] The impressive tome measures 2.01 m (6 ft 7 in) high and 3.08 m (10 ft 1 in) wide when open, containing 128 pages.

It has been translated into minority languages, such as the Irish language, by Éabhloid publishers in 2015.

Spanish editions[edit]

After being translated by Bonifacio del Carril, The Little Prince was first published in Spanish as El principito in September 1951 by the Argentine publisher Emecé Editores.^[104][105] Other Spanish editions have also been created; in 1956 the Mexican publisher Diana released its first edition of the book, El pequeño príncipe, a Spanish translation by José María Francés.^[8] Another edition of the work was produced in Spain in 1964 and, four years later, in 1968, editions were also produced in Colombia and Cuba, with translation by Luis Fernández in 1961. Chile had its first translation in 1981; Peru in February 1985; Venezuela in 1986, and Uruguay in 1990.^{[104][106][107]}
The book is among the few books in the Castilian cant Gacería^[108] (as El pitoche engrullón) or the Madrid slang Cheli^[109] (as El chaval principeras).

Bavarian editions[edit]

The Little Prince has an adaptation for the inhabitants of Bavaria, Austria and South Tyrol, covering for a large variety of the Bavarian language. The book was adapted by Johannes Limmer and published in 2019. It is called Da gloane Prinz and contains the original pictures of Saint-Exupéry.^[110]

Chinese editions[edit]

The Little Prince is one of the most popular and beloved foreign works of literature in China. It is reported that there are more than 70 Chinese translations of the novella.^[111] According to the official website of the Succession Antoine de Saint-Exupéry-d’Agay, the version translated by Li Jihong, which was published in January 2013, sold over two million copies in less than four years.^[112] Cheng Li-chun published a translation in Taiwan in May 2022.^[113]

Extension of copyrights in France[edit]

Due to Saint-Exupéry’s wartime death, his estate received the civil code designation Mort pour la France (English: Died for France), which was applied by the French government in 1948. Amongst the law’s provisions is an increase of 30 years in the duration of copyright;^[114] thus most of Saint-Exupéry’s creative works will not fall out of copyright status in France for an extra 30 years.^[115][76] So the original French text was in copyright almost everywhere in the world until 1 January 2015, remains under copyright in the US until 2039^[116] and will remain in copyright in France until 2032.^[117] EU law on copyright, however, fluctuates country by country, despite years of attempts to harmonize it at 70 years. French law allows for a copyright of 70 years from the author’s death. Saint-Exupery, because of extraordinary service to his nation, is granted an additional 30 years, meaning, in France, Le Petit Prince does not actually fall out of copyright until the end of 2044.^{[contradictory]}

Adaptations and sequels[edit]

The wide appeal of Saint-Exupéry’s novella has led to it being adapted into numerous forms over the decades. Additionally, the title character himself has been adapted in a number of promotional roles, including as a symbol of environmental protection, by the Toshiba Group.^[118] He has also been portrayed as a «virtual ambassador» in a campaign against smoking, employed by the Veolia Energy Services Group,^[118] and his name was used as an episode title in the TV series Lost.

The multi-layered fable, styled as a children’s story with its philosophical elements of irony and paradox directed towards adults, allowed The Little Prince to be transferred into various other art forms and media, including:

• Vinyl record, cassette and CD: as early as 1954 several audio editions in multiple languages were created on vinyl record, cassette tape and much later as a CD, with one English version narrated by Richard Burton.
• Radio broadcasts: radio plays were produced in the United States, with Raymond Burr, in 1956, and most recently in the United Kingdom on BBC in a 1999 dramatization by Bonnie Greer, produced by Pam Fraser Solomon.^[119]
• Film and TV: the story has been created as a movie as early as 1966 in a Soviet-Lithuanian production, with its first English movie version in 1974 produced in the United States featuring Bob Fosse, who choreographed his own dance sequence as «The Snake», and Gene Wilder as «The Fox». In 1987, a Turkish version was adopted into a direct-to-video film by Remzi Aydin Jonturk. Starting in 2010, a three-season-long animated series was made that expanded upon the book. In 2015, a major new 3D film, combining computer animation and stop motion animation, was released as The Little Prince in English and Le Petit Prince in French.^[120][121] In 2023, a 2D-animated series will be released.^[122]
• Stage: The Little Prince’s popular appeal has lent itself to widespread dramatic adaptations in live stage productions at both the professional and amateur levels. It has become a staple of numerous stage companies, with dozens of productions created.
• Graphic novel: a new printed version of the story in comic book form, by Joann Sfar in 2008, drew widespread notice.
• Pop-Up Book: a new printed edition, using the original text (as translated by Richard Howard in 2000) and St. Exupery’s original drawings as the basis for elaborate pop-up illustrations, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (ISBN 978-0-547-26069-3, 1st ed. 2009).
• Opera and ballet: several operatic and ballet versions of the novella have been produced as early as the Russian Malen′kiy, first performed in 1978 with a symphony score composed in the 1960s.
• Concert music: Concert Suite on Le Petit Prince for solo violin, solo harp and chamber orchestra by Jean-Pascal Beintus (premiered by the DSO Berlin – Kent Nagano – 2008)

• Anime: a Japanese animation TV series was made in 1978, Hoshi no Ōjisama: Petit Prince, containing 39 episodes that do not follow the plot of the original novella. Each episode contains an adventure on a planet, usually Earth, where the little prince meets different people each time and makes friends. Some key elements of the original story have been kept. Namely, the little prince’s golden hair, his scarf, laughter, his planet name (B-612), the rose and the three volcanoes. The anime had been aired and dubbed into several languages including Arabic, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese and Spanish. The English dub’s title is The Adventures of the Little Prince.^[123]
• Other: a number of musical references, game boards and a video game version of the novella have been released.

In 1997, Jean-Pierre Davidts wrote what could be considered a sequel to The Little Prince, entitled Le petit prince retrouvé (The Little Prince Returns).^[124] In this version, the shipwrecked narrator encounters the little prince on a lone island; the prince has returned to seek help against a tiger who threatens his sheep.^[125] Another sequel titled The Return of the Little Prince was written by former actress Ysatis de Saint-Simone, niece of Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry.^[126]

Honours and legacy[edit]

Museums and exhibits[edit]

Morgan exhibitions[edit]

New York City’s Morgan Library & Museum mounted three showings of the original manuscript, with its first showing in 1994, on the occasion of the story’s 50th anniversary of publication, followed by one celebrating the author’s centennial of birth in 2000, with its last and largest exhibition in 2014 honouring the novella’s 70th anniversary.

The 1994 exhibition displayed the original manuscript, translated by the museum’s art historian Ruth Kraemer,^[127] as well as a number of the story’s watercolours drawn from the Morgan’s permanent collection. Also included with the exhibits was a 20-minute video it produced, My Grown-Up Friend, Saint-Exupéry, narrated by actor Macaulay Culkin,^{[Note 12]} along with photos of the author, correspondence to Consuelo, a signed first edition of The Little Prince, and several international editions in other languages.^[93]

In January 2014, the museum mounted a third, significantly larger, exhibition centered on the novella’s creative origins and its history. The major showing of The Little Prince: A New York Story celebrated the story’s 70th anniversary.^[63] It examined both the novella’s New York origins and Saint-Exupéry’s creative processes, looking at his story and paintings as they evolved from conceptual germ form into progressively more refined versions and finally into the book’s highly polished first edition. It was as if visitors were able to look over his shoulder as he worked, according to curator Christine Nelson. Funding for the 2014 exhibition was provided by several benefactors, including The Florence Gould Foundation, The Caroline Macomber Fund, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Air France and the New York State Council on the Arts.^[62]

The new, more comprehensive exhibits included 35 watercolor paintings and 25 of the work’s original 140 handwritten manuscript pages,^[129] with his almost illegible handwriting penciled onto ‘Fidelity’ watermarked onion skin paper. The autograph manuscript pages included struck-through content that was not published in the novella’s first edition. As well, some 43 preparatory pencil drawings that evolved into the story’s illustrations accompanied the manuscript, many of them dampened by moisture that rippled its onion skin media.^[130][131] One painting depicted the prince floating above Earth wearing a yellow scarf was wrinkled, having been crumpled up and thrown away before being retrieved for preservation.^[48] Another drawing loaned from Silvia Hamilton’s grandson depicted the diminutive prince observing a sunset on his home asteroid; two other versions of the same drawing were also displayed alongside it allowing visitors to observe the drawing’s progressive refinement.^[60] The initial working manuscript and sketches, displayed side by side with pages from the novella’s first edition, allowed viewers to observe the evolution of Saint-Exupéry’s work.

Shortly before departing the United States to rejoin his reconnaissance squadron in North Africa in its struggle against Nazi Germany, Saint-Exupéry appeared unexpectedly in military uniform at the door of his intimate friend, Silvia Hamilton. He presented his working manuscript and its preliminary drawings in a «rumpled paper bag», placed onto her home’s entryway table, offering, «I’d like to give you something splendid, but this is all I have».^{[63][72][80][131][132]} Several of the manuscript pages bore accidental coffee stains and cigarette scorch marks.^[48] The Morgan later acquired the 30,000-word manuscript from Hamilton in 1968, with its pages becoming the centrepieces of its exhibitions on Saint-Exupéry’s work. The 2014 exhibition also borrowed artifacts and the author’s personal letters from the Saint-Exupéry-d’Gay Estate,^{[Note 13]} as well as materials from other private collections, libraries and museums in the United States and France.^[133] Running concurrent with its 2014 exhibition, the Morgan held a series of lectures, concerts and film showings, including talks by Saint-Exupéry biographer Stacy Schiff, writer Adam Gopnik, and author Peter Sís on his new work The Pilot and The Little Prince: The Life of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry,^[132][134]

Additional exhibits included photos of Saint-Exupéry by Life photojournalist John Phillips, other photos of the author’s New York area homes,^[62] an Orson Welles screenplay of the novella the filmmaker attempted to produce as a movie in collaboration with Walt Disney,^{[44][63][Note 14]} as well as one of the few signed copies extant of The Little Prince, gifted to Hamilton’s 12-year-old son.^{[Note 15]}

Permanent exhibits[edit]

• In Le Bourget, Paris, France, the Air and Space Museum of France established a special exhibit honoring Saint-Exupéry, and which displays many of his literary creations. Among them are various early editions of The Little Prince. Remnants of the Free French Air Force P-38 Lightning in which he disappeared, and which were recovered from the Mediterranean in 2004, are also on view.
• In Hakone, Japan there is the Museum of The Little Prince featuring outdoor squares and sculptures such as the B-612 Asteroid, the Lamplighter Square, and a sculpture of the Little Prince. The museum grounds additionally feature a Little Prince Park along with the Consuelo Rose Garden; however the main portion of the museum are its indoor exhibits.
• In Gyeonggi-do, South Korea, there is an imitation French village, Petite France, which has adapted the story elements of The Little Prince into its architecture and monuments. There are several sculptures of the story’s characters, and the village also offers overnight housing in some of the French-style homes. Featured are the history of The Little Prince, an art gallery, and a small amphitheatre situated in the middle of the village for musicians and other performances. The enterprise’s director stated that in 2009 the village received a half million visitors.^{[95][135][136]}

Special exhibitions[edit]

• 

  The Little Prince as part of a street art project in Funchal (Madeira)

  In 1996 the Danish sculptor Jens Galschiøt unveiled an artistic arrangement consisting of seven blocks of granite asteroids ‘floating’ in a circle around a 2-metre tall planet Earth. The artistic universe was populated by bronze sculpture figures that the little prince met on his journeys. As in the book, the prince discovers that «the essential is invisible to the eye, and only by the heart can you really see». The work was completed at the start of 1996 and placed in the central square of Fuglebjerg, Denmark,^[137] but was later stolen from an exhibition in Billund in 2011.^[138]

• During 2009 in São Paulo, Brazil, the giant Oca Art Exhibition Centre presented The Little Prince as part of The Year of France and The Little Prince. The displays covered over 10,000 square metres on four floors, examining Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince and their philosophies, as visitors passed through theme areas of the desert, different worlds, stars and the cosmos. The ground floor of the exhibit area was laid out as a huge map of the routes flown by the author and Aeropostale in South America and around the world. Also included was a full-scale replica of his Caudron Simoun, crashed in a simulated Sahara Desert.^{[139][140][141]}
• In 2012 the Catalan architect Jan Baca unveiled a sculpture in Terrassa, Catalonia showing the Little Prince along with the sentence, «It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye».^[142]
• In February 2022, nearly eight decades after it was written, «The Little Prince» has arrived in Paris. The exhibit began on February 17 and will end on June 26. It contains 600 items, including photographs, poems, and newspaper clippings relating to «The Little Prince.»^[143]

Places[edit]

Playground[edit]

• One of the «story playgrounds» – a series of playgrounds themed after famous children’s stories in Holon, Israel – is themed after The Little Prince. It features sculptures and play structures depicting scenes and characters from the book.

Schools[edit]

• L’école Le Petit Prince is the public elementary school in the small community of Genech in northern France, dedicated in 1994 upon the merger of two former schools. With nine classrooms and a library, its building overlooks the village’s Place Terre des Hommes,^[144] a square also named in tribute to Saint-Exupéry’s 1939 philosophical memoir, Terre des hommes.
• A K–6 elementary school on Avro Road in Maple, Ontario, Canada, was also opened in 1994 as L’école élémentaire catholique Le Petit Prince. Its enrollment expanded from 30 students in its first year to some 325 children by 2014. One of Saint-Exupéry’s colourful paintings of the prince is found on its website’s welcome page.^[145]

Avenue[edit]

• In southern Brazil, in the city of Florianópolis, there is the Avenida Pequeno Príncipe (Little Prince Avenue in Portuguese), whose name is a tribute to Saint-Exupéry, who passed through the city during his aviator career, an event that became part of the local culture.^[146]

Insignia and awards[edit]

• Prior to its decommissioning in 2010, the GR I/33 [fr] (later renamed as the 1/33 Belfort Squadron), one of the French Air Force squadrons Saint-Exupéry flew with, adopted the image of the Little Prince as part of the squadron and tail insignia of its Dassault Mirage fighter jets.^[147] Some of the fastest jets in the world were flown with The Prince gazing over their pilots’ shoulders.
• The Little Prince Literary Award for Persian fiction by writers under the age of 15, commemorating the title of Saint-Exupéry’s famous work, was created in Iran by the Cheragh-e Motale’eh Literary Foundation. In 2012, some 250 works by young authors were submitted for first stage review according to the society’s secretary Maryam Sistani, with the selection of the best three writers from 30 finalists being conducted in Tehran that September.^[148][149]
• Several other Little Prince Awards have also been established in Europe, meant to promote achievement and excellence in a variety of fields such as in assistance to autistic children, child literacy, children’s literature (by adults), Puppetry theatre and theatre arts.^{[150][151][152]}

Numismatics and philatelic[edit]

• Before France adopted the euro as its currency, Saint-Exupéry and drawings from The Little Prince were on the 50-franc banknote; the artwork was by Swiss designer Roger Pfund.^[75][153] Among the anti-counterfeiting measures on the banknote was micro-printed text from Le Petit Prince, visible with a strong magnifying glass.^[154] Additionally, a 100-franc commemorative coin was also released in 2000, with Saint-Exupéry’s image on its obverse, and that of the Little Prince on its reverse.^[155]
• In commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the writer’s untimely death, Israel issued a stamp honoring «Saint-Ex» and The Little Prince in 1994.^[156] Philatelic tributes have been printed in at least 24 other countries as of 2011.^[157]

Astronomy[edit]

• The B612 Foundation is a private foundation created to track Near-Earth objects that might pose a threat to Earth, and is dedicated to protecting the planet from asteroid strikes, similar to the Tunguska event of 1908. The private foundation was founded by a group of U.S. scientists and astronauts, including Clark Chapman, Piet Hut, Rusty Schweickart and Ed Lu in October 2002. The non-profit organization is named in honour of the prince’s home asteroid.^[158]
• An asteroid discovered in 1975, 2578 Saint-Exupéry, was also named after the author of The Little Prince.^[159]
• Another asteroid discovered in 1993 was named 46610 Bésixdouze, which is French for «B six twelve». The asteroid’s number, 46610, becomes B612 in hexadecimal notation. B-612 was the name of the prince’s home asteroid.
• In 2003 a small asteroid moon, Petit-Prince, discovered earlier in 1998, was named in part after The Little Prince.^[160]

The Little Prince Day[edit]

Since 2020, June 29 is International Little Prince Day. This date was chosen to commemorate the birth of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, which occurred on June 29, 1900. The Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Foundation started the initiative striving to promote the humanist values ​​carried by the book published in 1943. Mark Osborne was one of the first personalities to participate in the Little Prince Day 2020.^[161]

See also[edit]

• List of The Little Prince adaptations, a listing of The Little Prince story adapted into various media.
• The Little Prince (1974 film), a 1974 musical film directed by Stanley Donen
• The Little Prince (play), a theatrical adaptation
• The Little Prince (opera), an opera in two acts by Rachel Portman to an English libretto by Nicholas Wright
• The Adventures of The Little Prince (TV series), an anime series
• The Little Prince and the Aviator, a 1981 musical theatre adaptation
• Eloise at the Plaza, a 2003 TV film in which many references to The Little Prince can be identified
• The Little Prince (TV series), a 2010 TV series
• The Little Prince (2015 film), a 2015 animated film directed by Mark Osborne
• Le Monde‘s 100 Books of the Century
• Invisible Essence: The Little Prince, a 2018 documentary film about the book

Notes[edit]

References[edit]

Translations[edit]

• de Saint-Exupéry, Antoine (2006). The Little Prince: And Letter to a Hostage. Translated by Cuffe, T. V. F.. Penguin. ISBN 978-0-14-118562-0. OCLC 1023214985.
• ——— (6 September 2018). The Little Prince. Translated by Morpurgo, Michael. London: Vintage Children’s Classics. ISBN 9781784874179.
• ——— (30 May 2019). The Little Prince. Translated by Norminton, Gregory. Alma Classics. ISBN 978-1-84749-824-3.
• ——— (15 January 2018). The Little Prince. Translated by Testot-Ferry, Irene. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth. ISBN 978-1-84022-760-4. OCLC 1105536767.
• ——— (1943). The Little Prince. Translated by Woods, Katherine (1st ed.). New York: Reynal & Hitchcock. ISBN 9780152023980. OCLC 898880592. Retrieved 28 July 2020.

Sources[edit]

• Beaumont, Peter (1 August 2010). «Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince Poised for a Multimedia Return to Earth: The Boy Who Lived on an Asteroid Whose Tale Was Told in a Classic French Novella Is Being Revived on TV, Film And In Print». The Observer. Retrieved 15 October 2011.
• Brown, Hannibal (2004). «The Country Where the Stones Fly«. Visions of a Little Prince. Archived from the original (documentary research) on 29 March 2007. Retrieved 16 September 2011.
• Dunning, Jennifer (12 May 1989). «In the Footsteps of Saint-Exupery». The New York Times. Retrieved 14 September 2010.
• Heuré, Gilles (2006). L’insoumis: Léon Werth, 1878–1955. Paris: Éditions Viviane Hamy. ISBN 978-2878582192.
• Saint-Exupéry, Consuelo de (2003). The Tale of the Rose: The Love Story Behind The Little Prince. Translated by Allen, Esther. New York City: Random House. ISBN 978-0-8129-6717-3.
• Schiff, Stacy (1994). Saint-Exupéry: A Biography. Knopf. ISBN 978-0-679-40310-4.
• Schiff, Stacy (1996). Saint-Exupéry: A Biography. Vintage Canada. ISBN 978-0-679-30822-5.
• Schiff, Stacy (2006). Saint-Exupéry: A Biography. Henry Holt. ISBN 978-0-805-07913-5.
• Severson, Marilyn S. (2004). Masterpieces of French Literature: Greenwood Introduces Literary Masterpieces. Greenwood Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-313-31484-1.
• Webster, Paul (1993). Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: The Life and Death of The Little Prince. London: Pan Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-333-61702-1.

Further reading[edit]

• Dunn, Bruce. The Yellow Umbrella: A City Fable. Mushroom Press, 2009, ISBN 978-0615295404 (English)
• Galembert, Laurent de. La grandeur du Petit Prince (thesis), Éditions Le Manuscrit, 26 November 2002, ISBN 2-7481-1916-9 (French)

External links[edit]

• Le Petit Prince at Project Gutenberg Australia
• LePetitPrince.com (in French) Site officiel du Petit Prince; and TheLittlePrince.com Archived 26 December 2021 at the Wayback Machine Official site of The Little Prince
• NYC-ARTS Profile: The Little Prince, PBS interview on the 2014 Morgan Exhibition (video, 12:39)
• The Little Prince: A New York Story Exhibition, NBC news report on the 2014 Little Prince exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum (video, 3:10)
• Study Guide at SparkNotes
• www.petit-prince-collection.com Website dedicated to the largest collection of Little Prince books in the world. This impressive collection (nearly five thousand different editions of the full text in over 420 different languages and dialects) belongs to the Jean-Marc Probst Foundation for the Little Prince in Lausanne.
• The Little Prince excerpts and collection in 400 languages and dialects and in English
• List of different editions
• The Museum of The Little Prince in Hakone ; and 箱根の星の王子さまのミュージアム (in Japanese)
• A bibliography of biographical works on Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
• Il Piccolo Principe e Antoine De Saint-Exupéry (in Italian)
• Le Petit Prince series in Indic Languages
• Enthusiast website: The Little Prince Quotations
• The Little Prince Pictures (in Chinese)
• The Little Prince (in Arabic)
• laetaprinco.org Website dedicated to reading Little Prince online in popular languages.

This article is about the novella. For other uses, including films made from the book, see Little Prince.

The Little Prince

Author	Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Original title	Le Petit Prince
Translator	(English editions) Katherine Woods[1] Bonnie Greer[2] T.V.F. Cuffe[3] Michael Morpurgo[4] Irene Testot-Ferry[5] Alan Wakeman Janet Hill[6] David Wilkinson Gregory Norminton[7]
Illustrator	Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Cover artist	Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Country	France
Language	French
Publisher	Reynal & Hitchcock (U.S.) Gallimard (France)[8]
Publication date	April 1943 (U.S.: English & French) 1945 (France: French)[8][Note 1]
Awards	Le Monde’s 100 Books of the Century
Preceded by	Pilote de guerre (1942)
Followed by	Lettre à un otage [fr] (1944)

The Little Prince (French: Le Petit Prince, pronounced [lə p(ə)ti pʁɛ̃s]) is a novella by French aristocrat, writer, and military pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. It was first published in English and French in the United States by Reynal & Hitchcock in April 1943 and was published posthumously in France following liberation; Saint-Exupéry’s works had been banned by the Vichy Regime. The story follows a young prince who visits various planets in space, including Earth, and addresses themes of loneliness, friendship, love, and loss. Despite its style as a children’s book, The Little Prince makes observations about life, adults, and human nature.^[9]

The Little Prince became Saint-Exupéry’s most successful work, selling an estimated 140 million copies worldwide, which makes it one of the best-selling in history.^{[10][11][12][Note 2][14]} The book has been translated into over 505 different languages and dialects worldwide, being the second most translated work ever published, trailing only the Bible.^[15][16][17] The Little Prince has been adapted to numerous art forms and media, including audio recordings, radio plays, live stage, film, television, ballet, and opera.^[16][18]

Plot[edit]

The narrator begins with a discussion on the nature of grown-ups and their inability to perceive «important things». As a test to determine if a grown-up is as enlightened as a child, he shows them a picture depicting a boa constrictor which has eaten an elephant. The grown-ups always reply that the picture depicts a hat, and so he knows to only talk of «reasonable» things to them, rather than the fanciful.

The narrator becomes an aircraft pilot, and one day, his plane crashes in the Sahara desert, far from civilization. The narrator has an eight-day supply of water and must fix his aeroplane. Here, he is greeted unexpectedly by a young boy nicknamed «the little prince.» The prince has golden hair, a loveable laugh, and will repeat questions until they are answered.

The prince asks the narrator to draw a sheep. The narrator first shows him the picture of the elephant inside the snake, which, to the narrator’s surprise, the prince interprets correctly. After three failed attempts at drawing a sheep, the frustrated narrator draws a simple crate, claiming the sheep is inside. The prince exclaims that this was exactly the drawing he wanted.

Over the course of eight days in the desert, while the narrator attempts to repair his plane, the prince recounts his life story. He begins describing his tiny home planet: in effect, a house-sized asteroid known as «B 612» on Earth. The asteroid’s most prominent features are three minuscule volcanoes (two active, and one dormant or extinct) and a variety of plants.

The prince describes his earlier days cleaning the volcanoes and weeding unwanted seeds and sprigs that infest his planet’s soil; in particular, pulling out baobab trees that are constantly on the verge of overrunning the surface. If the baobabs are not rooted out the moment they are recognised, its roots can have a catastrophic effect on the tiny planet. Therefore, the prince wants a sheep to eat the undesirable plants, but worries it will also eat plants with thorns.

The prince tells of his love for a vain and silly rose that began growing on the asteroid’s surface some time ago. The rose is given to pretension, exaggerating ailments to gain attention and have the prince care for her. The prince says he nourished the rose and tended to her, making a screen and glass globe to protect her from the cold and wind, watering her, and keeping the caterpillars off.

Although the prince fell in love with the rose, he also began to feel that she was taking advantage of him, and he resolved to leave the planet to explore the rest of the universe. Upon their goodbyes, the rose apologises for failing to show that she loved him. She wishes him well and turns down his desire to leave her in the glass globe, saying she will protect herself. The prince laments that he did not understand how to love his rose while he was with her and should have listened to her kind actions, rather than her vain words.

The prince has since visited six other planets, each of which was inhabited by a single, irrational, narrow-minded adult, each meant to critique an element of society. They include:

• A king with no subjects, who only issues orders that can’t be followed, such as commanding the sun to set at sunset.
• A conceited man who only wants the praise which comes from admiration and being the most-admirable person on his otherwise uninhabited planet.
• A drunkard who drinks to forget the shame of drinking.
• A businessman who is blind to the beauty of the stars and instead endlessly counts and catalogues them in order to «own» them all (critiquing materialism).
• A lamplighter on a planet so small, a full day lasts a minute. He wastes his life blindly following orders to extinguish and relight the lamp-post every 30 seconds to correspond with his planet’s day and night.
• An elderly geographer who has never been anywhere, or seen any of the things he records, providing a caricature of specialisation in the contemporary world.

It is the geographer who tells the prince that his rose is an ephemeral being, which is not recorded, and recommends that the prince next visit the planet Earth. The visit to Earth begins with a deeply pessimistic appraisal of humanity. The six absurd people the prince encountered earlier comprise, according to the narrator, just about the entire adult world. On earth there were:

111 kings … 7,000 geographers, 900,000 businessmen, 7,500,000 tipplers, 311,000,000 conceited men; that is to say, about 2,000,000,000 grown-ups.

Since the prince landed in a desert, he believed that Earth was uninhabited. He then met a yellow snake that claimed to have the power to return him to his home, if he ever wished to return. The prince next met a desert flower, who told him that she had only seen a handful of men in this part of the world and that they had no roots, letting the wind blow them around and living hard lives. After climbing the highest mountain he had ever seen, the prince hoped to see the whole of Earth, thus finding the people; however, he saw only the enormous, desolate landscape. When the prince called out, his echo answered him, which he interpreted as the voice of a boring person who only repeats what another says.

The prince encountered a whole row of rosebushes, becoming downcast at having once thought that his own rose was unique and thinking his rose had lied about being unique. He began to feel that he was not a great prince at all, as his planet contained only three tiny volcanoes and a flower that he now thought of as common. He laid down on the grass and wept, until a fox came along.

The fox desired to be tamed and taught the prince how to tame him. By being tamed, something goes from being ordinary and just like all the others to being special and unique. There are drawbacks since the connection can lead to sadness and longing when apart.

From the fox, the prince learns that his rose was indeed unique and special because she was the object of the prince’s love and time; he had «tamed» her, and now she was more precious than all of the roses he had seen in the garden. Upon their sad departing, the fox imparts a secret: important things can only be seen with the heart, not the eyes.

The prince finally met two people from Earth:

• A railway switchman who told him how passengers constantly rushed from one place to another aboard trains, never satisfied with where they were and not knowing what they were after; only the children among them ever bothered to look out the windows.
• A merchant who talked to the prince about his product, a pill that eliminated the need to drink for a week, saving people 53 minutes.

Back in the present moment, it is the eighth day after the narrator’s plane crash and the narrator and the prince are dying of thirst. The prince has become visibly morose and saddened over his recollections and longs to return home and see his flower.

The prince finds a well, saving them. The narrator later finds the prince talking to the snake, discussing his return home and his desire to see his rose again, who, he worries, has been left to fend for herself. The prince bids an emotional farewell to the narrator and states that if it looks as though he has died, it is only because his body was too heavy to take with him to his planet. The prince warns the narrator not to watch him leave, as it will upset him. The narrator, realising what will happen, refuses to leave the prince’s side. The prince consoles the narrator by saying that he only need look at the stars to think of the prince’s loveable laughter, and that it will seem as if all the stars are laughing. The prince then walks away from the narrator and allows the snake to bite him, soundlessly falling down.

The next morning, the narrator is unable to find the prince’s body. He finally manages to repair his aeroplane and leave the desert. It is left up to the reader to determine if the prince returned home or died. The story ends with a drawing of the landscape where the prince and the narrator met and where the snake took the prince’s corporeal life. The narrator requests to be immediately contacted by anyone in that area encountering a small person with golden curls who refuses to answer any questions.

Tone and writing style[edit]

The story of The Little Prince is recalled in a sombre, measured tone by the pilot-narrator, in memory of his small friend, «a memorial to the prince—not just to the prince, but also to the time the prince and the narrator had together.»^[19] The Little Prince was created when Saint-Exupéry was «an ex-patriate and distraught about what was going on in his country and in the world.»^[14] According to one analysis, «the story of the Little Prince features a lot of fantastical, unrealistic elements…. You can’t ride a flock of birds to another planet… The fantasy of the Little Prince works because the logic of the story is based on the imagination of children, rather than the strict realism of adults.»^[20]

An exquisite literary perfectionist, akin to the 19th century French poet Stéphane Mallarmé,^[21] Saint-Exupéry produced draft pages «covered with fine lines of handwriting, much of it painstakingly crossed out, with one word left standing where there were a hundred words, one sentence substitut[ing] for a page…»^[22] He worked «long hours with great concentration.» According to the author himself, it was extremely difficult to start his creative writing processes.^[23] Biographer Paul Webster wrote of the aviator-author’s style: «Behind Saint-Exupéry’s quest for perfection was a laborious process of editing and rewriting which reduced original drafts by as much as two-thirds.»^[24] The French author frequently wrote at night, usually starting at about 11 p.m. accompanied by a tray of strong black coffee. In 1942 Saint-Exupéry related to his American English teacher, Adèle Breaux, that at such a time of night he felt «free» and able to concentrate, «writing for hours without feeling tired or sleepy», until he instantaneously dozed off.^[22] He would wake up later, in daylight, still at his desk, with his head on his arms. Saint-Exupéry stated it was the only way he could work, as once he started a writing project it became an obsession.^[25]

While Saint-Exupéry was a native speaker of French, he was never able to achieve anything more than haltingly poor English. Adèle Breaux, his young Northport English tutor to whom he later dedicated a writing («For Miss Adèle Breaux, who so gently guided me in the mysteries of the English language»), related her experiences with her famous student as Saint-Exupéry in America, 1942–1943: A Memoir, published in 1971.^[26]

«Saint-Exupéry’s prodigious writings and studies of literature sometimes gripped him, and on occasion he continued his readings of literary works until moments before take-off on solitary military reconnaissance flights, as he was adept at both reading and writing while flying. Taking off with an open book balanced on his leg, his ground crew would fear his mission would quickly end after contacting something ‘very hard’. On one flight, to the chagrin of colleagues awaiting his arrival, he circled the Tunis airport for an hour so that he could finish reading a novel. Saint-Exupéry frequently flew with a lined carnet (notebook) during his long, solo flights, and some of his philosophical writings were created during such periods when he could reflect on the world below him, becoming ‘enmeshed in a search for ideals which he translated into fable and parable’.»^[27][28]

Inspirations[edit]

Events and characters[edit]

In The Little Prince, its narrator, the pilot, talks of being stranded in the desert beside his crashed aircraft. The account clearly drew on Saint-Exupéry’s own experience in the Sahara, an ordeal described in detail in his 1939 memoir Wind, Sand and Stars (original French: Terre des hommes).^[9]

On 30 December 1935, at 02:45 am, after 19 hours and 44 minutes in the air, Saint-Exupéry, along with his copilot-navigator André Prévot, crashed in the Sahara desert.^[29] They were attempting to break the speed record for a Paris-to-Saigon flight in a then-popular type of air race called a raid, that had a prize of 150,000 francs.^[30] Their plane was a Caudron C-630 Simoun,^{[Note 3]} and the crash site is thought to have been near to the Wadi Natrun valley, close to the Nile Delta.^[31]

Both miraculously survived the crash, only to face rapid dehydration in the intense desert heat.^[32] Their maps were primitive and ambiguous. Lost among the sand dunes with a few grapes, a thermos of coffee, a single orange, and some wine, the pair had only one day’s worth of liquid. They both began to see mirages, which were quickly followed by more vivid hallucinations. By the second and third days, they were so dehydrated that they stopped sweating altogether. Finally, on the fourth day, a Bedouin on a camel discovered them and administered a native rehydration treatment, which saved Saint-Exupéry’s and Prévot’s lives.^[30]

In the novella, the fox, believed to be modeled after the author’s intimate New York City friend, Silvia Hamilton Reinhardt, tells the prince that his rose is unique and special, as she is the one he loves.^[33] The novella’s iconic phrase, «One sees clearly only with the heart» is believed to have been suggested by Reinhardt.

The fearsome, grasping baobab trees, researchers have contended, were meant to represent Nazism attempting to destroy the planet.^[33] The little prince’s reassurance to the pilot that the prince’s body is only an empty shell resembles the last words of Antoine’s dying younger brother François, who told the author, from his deathbed: «Don’t worry. I’m all right. I can’t help it. It’s my body».^[34]

Rose[edit]

Many researchers believe that the prince’s kindhearted, but petulant and vain, Rose was inspired by Saint-Exupéry’s Salvadoran wife Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry,^[33][35] with the small home planet being inspired by Guatemala where he crashed, broke multiple bones,^[36] and stayed to recover, surrounded with the view of 3 volcanoes.^[37] Despite a tumultuous marriage, Saint-Exupéry kept Consuelo close to his heart and portrayed her as the prince’s rose, whom he tenderly protects with a wind screen and places under a glass dome on his tiny planet. Saint-Exupéry’s infidelity and the doubts of his marriage are symbolized by the vast field of roses the prince encounters during his visit to Earth.^[9]

This interpretation was described by biographer Paul Webster who stated she was «the muse to whom Saint-Exupéry poured out his soul in copious letters … Consuelo was the rose in The Little Prince. «I should have judged her by her acts and not by her words», says the prince. «She wrapped herself around me and enlightened me. I should never have fled. I should have guessed at the tenderness behind her poor ruses.»^[24]

Prince[edit]

Saint-Exupéry probably has drawn inspiration for the prince’s character and appearance from his own self as a youth, as during his early years friends and family called him le Roi-Soleil («the Sun King») because of his golden curly hair. The author had also met a precocious eight-year-old with curly blond hair while he was residing with a family in Quebec City in 1942, Thomas De Koninck, the son of philosopher Charles De Koninck.^[38][39][40] Another possible inspiration for the little prince has been suggested as Land Morrow Lindbergh, the young, golden-haired son of fellow aviator Charles Lindbergh and his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, whom he met during an overnight stay at their Long Island home in 1939.^{[41][42][Note 4]}

Some have seen the prince as a Christ figure, as the child is sin-free and «believes in a life after death», subsequently returning to his personal heaven.^[43] When Life photojournalist John Phillips questioned the author-aviator on his inspiration for the child character, Saint-Exupéry told him that one day he looked down on what he thought was a blank sheet and saw a small childlike figure: «I asked him who he was», he replied. «I’m the Little Prince» was the reply.^[44]

One of Saint-Exupéry’s earliest literary references to a small prince is to be found in his second news dispatch from Moscow, dated 14 May 1935. In his writings as a special correspondent for Paris-Soir, the author described traveling from France to the Soviet Union by train. Late at night, during the trip, he ventured from his first-class accommodation into the third-class carriages, where he came upon large groups of Polish families huddled together, returning to their homeland. His commentary not only described a diminutive prince but also touched on several other themes Saint-Exupéry incorporated into various philosophical writings:^[45]

I sat down [facing a sleeping] couple. Between the man and the woman a child had hollowed himself out a place and fallen asleep. He turned in his slumber, and in the dim lamplight I saw his face. What an adorable face! A golden fruit had been born of these two peasants….. This is a musician’s face, I told myself. This is the child Mozart. This is a life full of beautiful promise. Little princes in legends are not different from this. Protected, sheltered, cultivated, what could not this child become? When by mutation a new rose is born in a garden, all gardeners rejoice. They isolate the rose, tend it, foster it. But there is no gardener for men. This little Mozart will be shaped like the rest by the common stamping machine…. This little Mozart is condemned.

— A Sense of Life: En Route to the U.S.S.R.

Background[edit]

Upon the outbreak of the Second World War, a laureate of several of France’s highest literary awards and a successful pioneering aviator prior to the war, Saint-Exupéry initially flew with a reconnaissance squadron as a reserve military pilot in the Armée de l’Air (French Air Force).^[9] After France’s defeat in 1940 and its armistice with Germany, he and Consuelo fled Occupied France and sojourned in North America, with Saint-Exupéry first arriving by himself at the very end of December 1940. His intention for the visit was to convince the United States to quickly enter the war against Nazi Germany and the Axis forces, and he soon became one of the expatriate voices of the French Resistance. In the midst of personal upheavals and failing health, he produced almost half of the writings for which he would be remembered, including a tender tale of loneliness, friendship, love and loss, in the form of a young prince visiting Earth.^[46]

An earlier memoir by the author recounted his aviation experiences in the Sahara, and he is thought to have drawn on the same experiences as plot elements in The Little Prince.

He wrote and illustrated the manuscript during the summer and fall of 1942. Although greeted warmly by French-speaking Americans and by fellow expatriates who had preceded him in New York, his 27-month stay would be marred by health problems and racked with periods of severe stress, martial and marital strife. These included partisan attacks on the author’s neutral stance towards supporters of both ardent French Gaullist and Vichy France.^[47] Saint-Exupéry’s American translator (the author spoke poor English) wrote: «He was restless and unhappy in exile, seeing no way to fight again for his country and refusing to take part in the political quarrels that set Frenchman against Frenchman.»^[22] However, the period was to be both a «dark but productive time» during which he created three important works.^[48]

Between January 1941 and April 1943, the Saint-Exupérys lived in two penthouse apartments on Central Park South,^[49] then the Bevin House mansion in Asharoken, New York, and still later at a rented house on Beekman Place in New York City.^[50][51]

The couple also stayed in Quebec for five weeks during the late spring of 1942, where they met a precocious eight-year-old boy with blond curly hair, Thomas, the son of philosopher Charles De Koninck, with whom the Saint-Exupérys resided.^{[52][53][54][55]} During an earlier visit to Long Island in August 1939, Saint-Exupéry had also met Land Morrow Lindbergh, the young, golden-haired son of the pioneering American aviator Charles Lindbergh and his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh.^[41][42]

After returning to the US from his Quebec speaking tour, Saint-Exupéry was pressed to work on a children’s book by Elizabeth Reynal, one of the wives of his US publisher, Reynal & Hitchcock. The French wife of Eugene Reynal had closely observed Saint-Exupéry for several months, and noting his ill health and high stress levels, she suggested to him that working on a children’s story would help.^{[56][Note 5]} The author wrote and illustrated The Little Prince at various locations in New York City but principally in the Long Island north-shore community of Asharoken in mid-to-late 1942, with the manuscript being completed in October.^[51][52][52]

Although the book was started in his Central Park South penthouse, Saint-Exupéry soon found New York City’s noise and sweltering summer heat too uncomfortable to work in and so Consuelo was dispatched to find improved accommodations. After spending some time at an unsuitable clapboard country house in Westport, Connecticut,^[57] they found Bevin House, a 22-room mansion in Asharoken that overlooked Long Island Sound. The author-aviator initially complained, «I wanted a hut, and it’s the Palace of Versailles.»^[46] As the weeks wore on, the author became invested in his project and the home would become «a haven for writing, the best place I have ever had anywhere in my life.»^[58] He devoted himself to the book on mostly midnight shifts,^[22] usually starting at about 11 pm, fueled by helpings of scrambled eggs on English muffins, gin and tonics, Coca-Colas, cigarettes and numerous visits by friends and expatriates who dropped in to see their famous countryman. One of the visitors was his wife’s Swiss writer paramour Denis de Rougemont, who also modeled for a painting of the Little Prince lying on his stomach, feet and arms extended up in the air.^[46][51] De Rougemont would later help Consuelo write her autobiography, The Tale of the Rose, as well as write his own biography of Saint-Exupéry.

While the author’s personal life was frequently chaotic, his creative process while writing was disciplined. Christine Nelson, curator of literary and historical manuscripts at the Morgan Library and Museum which had obtained Saint-Exupéry’s original manuscript in 1968, stated: «On the one hand, he had a clear vision for the shape, tone, and message of the story. On the other hand, he was ruthless about chopping out entire passages that just weren’t quite right», eventually distilling the 30,000 word manuscript, accompanied by small illustrations and sketches, to approximately half its original length.^[59] The story, the curator added, was created when he was «an ex-patriate and distraught about what was going on in his country and in the world.»^[14]

The large white Second French Empire-style mansion, hidden behind tall trees, afforded the writer a multitude of work environments, but he usually wrote at a large dining table.^[22] It also allowed him to alternately work on his writings and then on his sketches and watercolours for hours at a time, moving his armchair and paint easel from the library towards the parlor one room at a time in search of sunlight. His meditative view of sunsets at the Bevin House were incorporated in the book, where the prince visits a small planet with 43 daily sunsets, a planet where all that is needed to watch a sunset «is move your chair a few steps.»^{[46][51][Note 6]}

Manuscript[edit]

The original 140-page autograph manuscript of The Little Prince, along with various drafts and trial drawings, were acquired from the author’s close friend Silvia Hamilton in 1968 by curator Herbert Cahoon of the Pierpont Morgan Library (now The Morgan Library & Museum) in Manhattan, New York City.^[11][60][61] It is the only known surviving handwritten draft of the complete work.^[62] The manuscript’s pages include large amounts of the author’s prose that was struck-through and therefore not published as part of the first edition. In addition to the manuscript, several watercolour illustrations by the author are also held by the museum. They were not part of the first edition. The institution has marked both the 50th and 70th anniversaries of the novella’s publication, along with the centenary celebration of the author’s birth, with major exhibitions of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s literary works.^[33][63] Physically, the manuscript’s onion skin media has become brittle and subject to damage. Saint-Exupéry’s handwriting is described as being doctor-like, verging on indecipherable.^[64]

The story’s keynote aphorism, On ne voit bien qu’avec le cœur. L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux («One sees clearly only with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye») was reworded and rewritten some 15 times before achieving its final phrasing. Saint-Exupéry also used a Dictaphone recorder to produce oral drafts for his typist.^[22][60] His initial 30,000-word working manuscript was distilled to less than half its original size through laborious editing sessions. Multiple versions of its many pages were created and its prose then polished over several drafts, with the author occasionally telephoning friends at 2:00 a.m. to solicit opinions on his newly written passages.^[22]

Many pages and illustrations were cut from the finished work as he sought to maintain a sense of ambiguity to the story’s theme and messages. Included among the deletions in its 17th chapter were references to locales in New York, such as the Rockefeller Center and Long Island. Other deleted pages described the prince’s vegetarian diet and the garden on his home asteroid that included beans, radishes, potatoes and tomatoes, but which lacked fruit trees that might have overwhelmed the prince’s planetoid. Deleted chapters discussed visits to other asteroids occupied by a retailer brimming with marketing phrases, and an inventor whose creation could produce any object desired at a touch of its controls. Likely the result of the ongoing war in Europe weighing on Saint-Exupéry’s shoulders, the author produced a sombre three-page epilogue lamenting «On one star someone has lost a friend, on another someone is ill, on another someone is at war…», with the story’s pilot-narrator noting of The Prince: «he sees all that. . . . For him, the night is hopeless. And for me, his friend, the night is also hopeless.» The draft epilogue was also omitted from the novella’s printing.^[60]

Further information: Morgan exhibitions

In April 2012 a Parisian auction house announced the discovery of two previously unknown draft manuscript pages that included new text.^[10][65] In the newly discovered material the Prince meets his first Earthling after his arrival. The person he meets is an «ambassador of the human spirit».^[10][65] The ambassador is too busy to talk, saying he is searching for a missing six letter word: «I am looking for a six-letter word that starts with G that means ‘gargling’ «, he says. Saint-Exupéry’s text does not say what the word is, but experts believe it could be «guerre» (or «war»). The novella thus takes a more politicized tack with an anti-war sentiment, as ‘to gargle’ in French is an informal reference to ‘honour’, which the author may have viewed as a key factor in military confrontations between nations.^[65][66]

Dedication[edit]

Saint-Exupéry met Léon Werth (1878–1955), a writer and art critic, in 1931. Werth soon became Saint-Exupery’s closest friend outside of his Aeropostale associates. Werth was an anarchist, a leftist Bolshevik supporter of Jewish descent, twenty-two years older than Saint-Exupéry.

Saint-Exupéry dedicated two books to him, Lettre à un otage [fr] (Letter to a Hostage) and Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince), and referred to Werth in three more of his works. At the beginning of the Second World War while writing The Little Prince, Saint-Exupéry lived in his downtown New York City apartment, thinking of his native France and his friends. Werth spent the war unobtrusively in Saint-Amour, his village in the Jura, a mountainous region near Switzerland where he was «alone, cold and hungry», a place that had few polite words for French refugees. Werth appears in the preamble to the novella, where Saint-Exupéry dedicates the book to him:^[67]

To Leon Werth

I ask children to forgive me for dedicating this book to a grown-up. I have a serious excuse: this grown-up is the best friend I have in the world. I have another excuse: this grown-up can understand everything, even books for children. I have a third excuse: he lives in France where he is hungry and cold. He needs to be comforted. If all these excuses are not enough then I want to dedicate this book to the child whom this grown-up once was. All grown-ups were children first. (But few of them remember it.) So I correct my dedication:

To Leon Werth,

When he was a little boy

Saint-Exupéry’s aircraft disappeared over the Mediterranean in July 1944. The following month, Werth learned of his friend’s disappearance from a radio broadcast. Without having yet heard of The Little Prince, in November, Werth discovered that Saint-Exupéry had published a fable the previous year in the U.S., which he had illustrated himself, and that it was dedicated to him.^[68] At the end of the Second World War, which Antoine de Saint-Exupéry did not live to see, Werth said: «Peace, without Tonio (Saint-Exupéry) isn’t entirely peace.» Werth did not see the text for which he was so responsible until five months after his friend’s death, when Saint-Exupéry’s French publisher, Gallimard, sent him a special edition. Werth died in Paris in 1955.

Illustrations[edit]

All of the novella’s simple but elegant watercolour illustrations, which were integral to the story, were painted by Saint-Exupéry. He had studied architecture as a young adult but nevertheless could not be considered an artist – which he self-mockingly alluded to in the novella’s introduction. Several of his illustrations were painted on the wrong side of the delicate onion skin paper that he used, his medium of choice.^[51] As with some of his draft manuscripts, he occasionally gave away preliminary sketches to close friends and colleagues; others were even recovered as crumpled balls from the floors in the cockpits he flew.^{[Note 7]} Two or three original Little Prince drawings were reported in the collections of New York artist, sculptor and experimental filmmaker Joseph Cornell.^[69] One rare original Little Prince watercolour would be mysteriously sold at a second-hand book fair in Japan in 1994, and subsequently authenticated in 2007.^[70][71]

An unrepentant lifelong doodler and sketcher, Saint-Exupéry had for many years sketched little people on his napkins, tablecloths, letters to paramours and friends, lined notebooks and other scraps of paper.^[44][46] Early figures took on a multitude of appearances, engaged in a variety of tasks. Some appeared as doll-like figures, baby puffins, angels with wings, and even a figure similar to that in Robert Crumb’s later famous Keep On Truckin’ of 1968. In a 1940 letter to a friend he sketched a character with his own thinning hair, sporting a bow tie, viewed as a boyish alter-ego, and he later gave a similar doodle to Elizabeth Reynal at his New York publisher’s office.^[44] Most often the diminutive figure was expressed as «…a slip of a boy with a turned up nose, lots of hair, long baggy pants that were too short for him and with a long scarf that whipped in the wind. Usually the boy had a puzzled expression… [T]his boy Saint-Exupéry came to think of as «the little prince», and he was usually found standing on top of a tiny planet. Most of the time he was alone, sometimes walking up a path. Sometimes there was a single flower on the planet.»^[57] His characters were frequently seen chasing butterflies; when asked why they did so, Saint-Exupéry, who thought of the figures as his alter-egos, replied that they were actually pursuing a «realistic ideal».^[46] Saint-Exupéry eventually settled on the image of the young, precocious child with curly blond hair, an image which would become the subject of speculations as to its source. One «most striking» illustration depicted the pilot-narrator asleep beside his stranded plane prior to the prince’s arrival. Although images of the narrator were created for the story, none survived Saint-Exupéry’s editing process.^[14]

To mark both the 50th and 70th anniversaries of The Little Prince’s publication, the Morgan Library and Museum mounted major exhibitions of Saint-Exupéry’s draft manuscript, preparatory drawings, and similar materials that it had obtained earlier from a variety of sources. One major source was an intimate friend of his in New York City, Silvia Hamilton (later, Reinhardt), to whom the author gave his working manuscript just prior to returning to Algiers to resume his work as a Free French Air Force pilot.^[33][63][72] Hamilton’s black poodle, Mocha, is believed to have been the model for the Little Prince’s sheep, with a Raggedy Ann type doll helping as a stand-in for the prince.^[62] Additionally, a pet boxer, Hannibal, that Hamilton gave to him as a gift may have been the model for the story’s desert fox and its tiger.^[48] A museum representative stated that the novella’s final drawings were lost.^[33]

Seven unpublished drawings for the book were also displayed at the museum’s exhibit, including fearsome looking baobab trees ready to destroy the prince’s home asteroid, as well as a picture of the story’s narrator, the forlorn pilot, sleeping next to his aircraft. That image was likely omitted to avoid giving the story a ‘literalness’ that would distract its readers, according to one of the Morgan Library’s staff.^[33] According to Christine Nelson, curator of literary and historical manuscripts at the Morgan, «[t]he image evokes Saint-Exupéry’s own experience of awakening in an isolated, mysterious place. You can almost imagine him wandering without much food and water and conjuring up the character of the Little Prince.»^[14] Another reviewer noted that the author «chose the best illustrations… to maintain the ethereal tone he wanted his story to exude. Choosing between ambiguity and literal text and illustrations, Saint-Exupéry chose in every case to obfuscate.»^[73] Not a single drawing of the story’s narrator–pilot survived the author’s editing process; «he was very good at excising what was not essential to his story».^[14]

In 2001 Japanese researcher Yoshitsugu Kunugiyama surmised that the cover illustration Saint-Exupéry painted for Le Petit Prince deliberately depicted a stellar arrangement created to celebrate the author’s own centennial of birth. According to Kunugiyama, the cover art chosen from one of Saint-Exupéry’s watercolour illustrations contained the planets Saturn and Jupiter, plus the star Aldebaran, arranged as an isosceles triangle, a celestial configuration which occurred in the early 1940s, and which he likely knew would next reoccur in the year 2000.^[74] Saint-Exupéry possessed superior mathematical skills and was a master celestial navigator, a vocation he had studied at Salon-de-Provence with the Armée de l’Air (French Air Force).

Post-publication[edit]

Stacy Schiff, one of Saint-Exupéry’s principal biographers, wrote of him and his most famous work, «rarely have an author and a character been so intimately bound together as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and his Little Prince», and remarking of their dual fates, «the two remain tangled together, twin innocents who fell from the sky».^[75] Another noted that the novella’s mystique was «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.»^[76]

Only weeks after his novella was first published in April 1943, despite his wife’s pleadings and before Saint-Exupéry had received any of its royalties (he never would), the author-aviator joined the Free French Forces. He would remain immensely proud of The Little Prince, and almost always kept a personal copy with him which he often read to others during the war.^[75]

As part of a 32 ship military convoy he voyaged to North Africa where he rejoined his old squadron to fight with the Allies, resuming his work as a reconnaissance pilot despite the best efforts of his friends, colleagues and fellow airmen who could not prevent him from flying.^{[Note 8]} He had previously escaped death by the barest of margins a number of times, but was then lost in action during a July 1944 spy mission from the moonscapes of Corsica to the continent in preparation for the Allied invasion of occupied France, only three weeks before the Liberation of Paris.^{[46][Note 9]}

Reception[edit]

Many of the book’s initial reviewers were flummoxed by the fable’s multi-layered story line and its morals,^[9] perhaps expecting a significantly more conventional story from one of France’s leading writers. Its publisher had anticipated such reactions to a work that fell neither exclusively into a children’s nor adult’s literature classification. The New York Times reviewer wrote shortly before its publication «What makes a good children’s book? … The Little Prince, which is a fascinating fable for grown-ups [is] of conjectural value for boys and girls of 6, 8 and 10. [It] may very well be a book on the order of Gulliver’s Travels, something that exists on two levels»; «Can you clutter up a narrative with paradox and irony and still hold the interest of 8 and 10-year olds?» Notwithstanding the story’s duality, the review added that major portions of the story would probably still «capture the imagination of any child.»^[79] Addressing whether it was written for children or adults, Reynal & Hitchcock promoted it ambiguously, saying that as far as they were concerned «it’s the new book by Saint-Exupéry», adding to its dustcover «There are few stories which in some way, in some degree, change the world forever for their readers. This is one.»^[60]

Others were not shy in offering their praise. Austin Stevens, also of The New York Times, stated that the story possessed «…large portions of the Saint-Exupéry philosophy and poetic spirit. In a way it’s a sort of credo.»^[57] P.L. Travers, author of the Mary Poppins series of children books, wrote in a New York Herald Tribune review: «The Little Prince will shine upon children with a sidewise gleam. It will strike them in some place that is not the mind and glow there until the time comes for them to comprehend it.»^[60][80]

British journalist Neil Clark, in The American Conservative in 2009, offered an expansive view of Saint-Exupéry’s overall work by commenting that it provides a «…bird’s eye view of humanity [and] contains some of the most profound observations on the human condition ever written», and that the author’s novella «doesn’t merely express his contempt for selfishness and materialism [but] shows how life should be lived.»^[81]

The book enjoyed modest initial success, residing on The New York Times Best Seller list for only two weeks,^[64] as opposed to his earlier 1939 English translation, Wind, Sand and Stars which remained on the same list for nearly five months.^[44] As a cultural icon, the novella regularly draws new readers and reviewers, selling almost two million copies annually and also spawning numerous adaptations. Modern-day references to The Little Prince include one from The New York Times that describes it as «abstract» and «fabulistic».^[63]

Literary translations and printed editions[edit]

As of April 2017,^[82] The Little Prince became the world’s most translated non-religious book (into 300 languages) together with Italian novel The Adventures of Pinocchio.

Katherine Woods (1886–1968)^[83] produced the first English translation of 1943, which was later joined by several other English translations. Her translation contained some errors.^[84][85] Mistranslations aside, one reviewer noted that Wood’s almost «poetic» English translation has long been admired by many Little Prince lovers, who have spanned generations (it stayed in print until 2001), as her work maintains Saint-Exupéry’s story-telling spirit and charm, if not its literal accuracy.^[73] As of 2019 at least seven additional English translations have been published:^[86]

• Irene Testot-Ferry, (ISBN 0-7567-5189-6, 1st ed. 1995)
• T.V.F. Cuffe, (ISBN 0-14-118562-7, 1st ed. 1995)
• Alan Wakeman, (ISBN 1-86205-066-X, 1st ed. 1995)^[87]
• Richard Howard, (ISBN 0-15-204804-9, 1st ed. 2000)^[6]
• Ros and Chloe Schwartz, (ISBN 9781907360015, 1st ed. 2010)^[88]
• David Wilkinson, (bilingual English-French student edition, ISBN 0-9567215-9-1, 1st ed. 2011)
• Michael Morpurgo, (ISBN 978-1784874179, 1st ed. 2018)
• Guillain Méjane, (translated via the PoesIA project, a convolutional neural network, ISBN 9798621081355, 1st ed. 2020)

The Little Prince was also translated by Bonnie Greer for a BBC radio adaptation in 1999.

• Bonnie Greer, BBC Radio 4, broadcast 25 December 1999.^[2]

Each translation approaches the essence of the original with an individual style and focus.^[89][90]

Le Petit Prince is often used as a beginner’s book for French-language students, and several bilingual and trilingual translations have been published. As of 2017, it has been translated into more than 300 languages and dialects, including Sardinian,^[91] the constructed international languages of Esperanto and Klingon, and the Congolese language Alur, as well as being printed in Braille for blind readers. It is also often used as an introduction into endangered varieties with very few speakers like Maya (2001), Aromanian (2006) or Banat Bulgarian (2017). It is one of the few modern books to have been translated into Latin, as Regulus, vel Pueri soli sapiunt^[92][93] in 1961 by Auguste Haury (1910–2002) and as Regulus in 2010 by Alexander Winkler. In 2005, the book was also translated into Toba Qom, an indigenous language of northern Argentina, as So Shiyaxauolec Nta’a. It was the first book translated into that language since the New Testament. It was also translated to a northern Italian dialect, Vogherese. Anthropologist Florence Tola, commenting on the suitability of the work for Toban translation, said there is «nothing strange [when] the Little Prince speaks with a snake or a fox and travels among the stars, it fits perfectly into the Toba mythology».^[94]

Linguists have compared the many translations and even editions of the same translation for style, composition, titles, wordings and genealogy. As an example: as of 2011 there are approximately 47 translated editions of The Little Prince in Korean,^{[Note 10]} and there are also about 50 different translated editions in Chinese (produced in both mainland China and Taiwan). Many of them are titled Prince From a Star, while others carry the book title that is a direct translation of The Little Prince.^[96] By studying the use of word phrasings, nouns, mistranslations and other content in newer editions, linguists can identify the source material for each version: whether it was derived from the original French typescript, or from its first translation into English by Katherine Woods, or from a number of adapted sources.^[73][97]

The first edition to be published in France, Saint-Exupéry’s birthplace, was printed by his regular publisher in that country, Gallimard, only after^[8] the German occupation of France ended.^{[98][Note 11]} Prior to France’s liberation new printings of Saint-Exupéry’s works were made available only by means of secret print runs,^[100][101] such as that of February 1943 when 1,000 copies of an underground version of his best seller Pilote de guerre, describing the German invasion of France, were covertly printed in Lyon.^[102]

Commemorating the novella’s 70th anniversary of publication, in conjunction with the 2014 Morgan Exhibition, Éditions Gallimard released a complete facsimile edition of Saint-Exupéry’s original handwritten manuscript entitled Le Manuscrit du Petit Prince d’Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: Facsimilé et Transcription, edited by Alban Cerisier and Delphine Lacroix. The book in its final form has also been republished in 70th anniversary editions by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (in English) and by Gallimard (in French).^[62]

A Portuguese translation of the novella in 2007, edited by Eidouro Gráfica e Editora Ltda and presented at the XIII Biannual Book Fair of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, holds the Guinness World Record for world’s largest book published.^[103] The impressive tome measures 2.01 m (6 ft 7 in) high and 3.08 m (10 ft 1 in) wide when open, containing 128 pages.

It has been translated into minority languages, such as the Irish language, by Éabhloid publishers in 2015.

Spanish editions[edit]

After being translated by Bonifacio del Carril, The Little Prince was first published in Spanish as El principito in September 1951 by the Argentine publisher Emecé Editores.^[104][105] Other Spanish editions have also been created; in 1956 the Mexican publisher Diana released its first edition of the book, El pequeño príncipe, a Spanish translation by José María Francés.^[8] Another edition of the work was produced in Spain in 1964 and, four years later, in 1968, editions were also produced in Colombia and Cuba, with translation by Luis Fernández in 1961. Chile had its first translation in 1981; Peru in February 1985; Venezuela in 1986, and Uruguay in 1990.^{[104][106][107]}
The book is among the few books in the Castilian cant Gacería^[108] (as El pitoche engrullón) or the Madrid slang Cheli^[109] (as El chaval principeras).

Bavarian editions[edit]

The Little Prince has an adaptation for the inhabitants of Bavaria, Austria and South Tyrol, covering for a large variety of the Bavarian language. The book was adapted by Johannes Limmer and published in 2019. It is called Da gloane Prinz and contains the original pictures of Saint-Exupéry.^[110]

Chinese editions[edit]

The Little Prince is one of the most popular and beloved foreign works of literature in China. It is reported that there are more than 70 Chinese translations of the novella.^[111] According to the official website of the Succession Antoine de Saint-Exupéry-d’Agay, the version translated by Li Jihong, which was published in January 2013, sold over two million copies in less than four years.^[112] Cheng Li-chun published a translation in Taiwan in May 2022.^[113]

Extension of copyrights in France[edit]

Due to Saint-Exupéry’s wartime death, his estate received the civil code designation Mort pour la France (English: Died for France), which was applied by the French government in 1948. Amongst the law’s provisions is an increase of 30 years in the duration of copyright;^[114] thus most of Saint-Exupéry’s creative works will not fall out of copyright status in France for an extra 30 years.^[115][76] So the original French text was in copyright almost everywhere in the world until 1 January 2015, remains under copyright in the US until 2039^[116] and will remain in copyright in France until 2032.^[117] EU law on copyright, however, fluctuates country by country, despite years of attempts to harmonize it at 70 years. French law allows for a copyright of 70 years from the author’s death. Saint-Exupery, because of extraordinary service to his nation, is granted an additional 30 years, meaning, in France, Le Petit Prince does not actually fall out of copyright until the end of 2044.^{[contradictory]}

Adaptations and sequels[edit]

The wide appeal of Saint-Exupéry’s novella has led to it being adapted into numerous forms over the decades. Additionally, the title character himself has been adapted in a number of promotional roles, including as a symbol of environmental protection, by the Toshiba Group.^[118] He has also been portrayed as a «virtual ambassador» in a campaign against smoking, employed by the Veolia Energy Services Group,^[118] and his name was used as an episode title in the TV series Lost.

The multi-layered fable, styled as a children’s story with its philosophical elements of irony and paradox directed towards adults, allowed The Little Prince to be transferred into various other art forms and media, including:

• Vinyl record, cassette and CD: as early as 1954 several audio editions in multiple languages were created on vinyl record, cassette tape and much later as a CD, with one English version narrated by Richard Burton.
• Radio broadcasts: radio plays were produced in the United States, with Raymond Burr, in 1956, and most recently in the United Kingdom on BBC in a 1999 dramatization by Bonnie Greer, produced by Pam Fraser Solomon.^[119]
• Film and TV: the story has been created as a movie as early as 1966 in a Soviet-Lithuanian production, with its first English movie version in 1974 produced in the United States featuring Bob Fosse, who choreographed his own dance sequence as «The Snake», and Gene Wilder as «The Fox». In 1987, a Turkish version was adopted into a direct-to-video film by Remzi Aydin Jonturk. Starting in 2010, a three-season-long animated series was made that expanded upon the book. In 2015, a major new 3D film, combining computer animation and stop motion animation, was released as The Little Prince in English and Le Petit Prince in French.^[120][121] In 2023, a 2D-animated series will be released.^[122]
• Stage: The Little Prince’s popular appeal has lent itself to widespread dramatic adaptations in live stage productions at both the professional and amateur levels. It has become a staple of numerous stage companies, with dozens of productions created.
• Graphic novel: a new printed version of the story in comic book form, by Joann Sfar in 2008, drew widespread notice.
• Pop-Up Book: a new printed edition, using the original text (as translated by Richard Howard in 2000) and St. Exupery’s original drawings as the basis for elaborate pop-up illustrations, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (ISBN 978-0-547-26069-3, 1st ed. 2009).
• Opera and ballet: several operatic and ballet versions of the novella have been produced as early as the Russian Malen′kiy, first performed in 1978 with a symphony score composed in the 1960s.
• Concert music: Concert Suite on Le Petit Prince for solo violin, solo harp and chamber orchestra by Jean-Pascal Beintus (premiered by the DSO Berlin – Kent Nagano – 2008)

• Anime: a Japanese animation TV series was made in 1978, Hoshi no Ōjisama: Petit Prince, containing 39 episodes that do not follow the plot of the original novella. Each episode contains an adventure on a planet, usually Earth, where the little prince meets different people each time and makes friends. Some key elements of the original story have been kept. Namely, the little prince’s golden hair, his scarf, laughter, his planet name (B-612), the rose and the three volcanoes. The anime had been aired and dubbed into several languages including Arabic, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese and Spanish. The English dub’s title is The Adventures of the Little Prince.^[123]
• Other: a number of musical references, game boards and a video game version of the novella have been released.

In 1997, Jean-Pierre Davidts wrote what could be considered a sequel to The Little Prince, entitled Le petit prince retrouvé (The Little Prince Returns).^[124] In this version, the shipwrecked narrator encounters the little prince on a lone island; the prince has returned to seek help against a tiger who threatens his sheep.^[125] Another sequel titled The Return of the Little Prince was written by former actress Ysatis de Saint-Simone, niece of Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry.^[126]

Honours and legacy[edit]

Museums and exhibits[edit]

Morgan exhibitions[edit]

New York City’s Morgan Library & Museum mounted three showings of the original manuscript, with its first showing in 1994, on the occasion of the story’s 50th anniversary of publication, followed by one celebrating the author’s centennial of birth in 2000, with its last and largest exhibition in 2014 honouring the novella’s 70th anniversary.

The 1994 exhibition displayed the original manuscript, translated by the museum’s art historian Ruth Kraemer,^[127] as well as a number of the story’s watercolours drawn from the Morgan’s permanent collection. Also included with the exhibits was a 20-minute video it produced, My Grown-Up Friend, Saint-Exupéry, narrated by actor Macaulay Culkin,^{[Note 12]} along with photos of the author, correspondence to Consuelo, a signed first edition of The Little Prince, and several international editions in other languages.^[93]

In January 2014, the museum mounted a third, significantly larger, exhibition centered on the novella’s creative origins and its history. The major showing of The Little Prince: A New York Story celebrated the story’s 70th anniversary.^[63] It examined both the novella’s New York origins and Saint-Exupéry’s creative processes, looking at his story and paintings as they evolved from conceptual germ form into progressively more refined versions and finally into the book’s highly polished first edition. It was as if visitors were able to look over his shoulder as he worked, according to curator Christine Nelson. Funding for the 2014 exhibition was provided by several benefactors, including The Florence Gould Foundation, The Caroline Macomber Fund, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Air France and the New York State Council on the Arts.^[62]

The new, more comprehensive exhibits included 35 watercolor paintings and 25 of the work’s original 140 handwritten manuscript pages,^[129] with his almost illegible handwriting penciled onto ‘Fidelity’ watermarked onion skin paper. The autograph manuscript pages included struck-through content that was not published in the novella’s first edition. As well, some 43 preparatory pencil drawings that evolved into the story’s illustrations accompanied the manuscript, many of them dampened by moisture that rippled its onion skin media.^[130][131] One painting depicted the prince floating above Earth wearing a yellow scarf was wrinkled, having been crumpled up and thrown away before being retrieved for preservation.^[48] Another drawing loaned from Silvia Hamilton’s grandson depicted the diminutive prince observing a sunset on his home asteroid; two other versions of the same drawing were also displayed alongside it allowing visitors to observe the drawing’s progressive refinement.^[60] The initial working manuscript and sketches, displayed side by side with pages from the novella’s first edition, allowed viewers to observe the evolution of Saint-Exupéry’s work.

Shortly before departing the United States to rejoin his reconnaissance squadron in North Africa in its struggle against Nazi Germany, Saint-Exupéry appeared unexpectedly in military uniform at the door of his intimate friend, Silvia Hamilton. He presented his working manuscript and its preliminary drawings in a «rumpled paper bag», placed onto her home’s entryway table, offering, «I’d like to give you something splendid, but this is all I have».^{[63][72][80][131][132]} Several of the manuscript pages bore accidental coffee stains and cigarette scorch marks.^[48] The Morgan later acquired the 30,000-word manuscript from Hamilton in 1968, with its pages becoming the centrepieces of its exhibitions on Saint-Exupéry’s work. The 2014 exhibition also borrowed artifacts and the author’s personal letters from the Saint-Exupéry-d’Gay Estate,^{[Note 13]} as well as materials from other private collections, libraries and museums in the United States and France.^[133] Running concurrent with its 2014 exhibition, the Morgan held a series of lectures, concerts and film showings, including talks by Saint-Exupéry biographer Stacy Schiff, writer Adam Gopnik, and author Peter Sís on his new work The Pilot and The Little Prince: The Life of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry,^[132][134]

Additional exhibits included photos of Saint-Exupéry by Life photojournalist John Phillips, other photos of the author’s New York area homes,^[62] an Orson Welles screenplay of the novella the filmmaker attempted to produce as a movie in collaboration with Walt Disney,^{[44][63][Note 14]} as well as one of the few signed copies extant of The Little Prince, gifted to Hamilton’s 12-year-old son.^{[Note 15]}

Permanent exhibits[edit]

• In Le Bourget, Paris, France, the Air and Space Museum of France established a special exhibit honoring Saint-Exupéry, and which displays many of his literary creations. Among them are various early editions of The Little Prince. Remnants of the Free French Air Force P-38 Lightning in which he disappeared, and which were recovered from the Mediterranean in 2004, are also on view.
• In Hakone, Japan there is the Museum of The Little Prince featuring outdoor squares and sculptures such as the B-612 Asteroid, the Lamplighter Square, and a sculpture of the Little Prince. The museum grounds additionally feature a Little Prince Park along with the Consuelo Rose Garden; however the main portion of the museum are its indoor exhibits.
• In Gyeonggi-do, South Korea, there is an imitation French village, Petite France, which has adapted the story elements of The Little Prince into its architecture and monuments. There are several sculptures of the story’s characters, and the village also offers overnight housing in some of the French-style homes. Featured are the history of The Little Prince, an art gallery, and a small amphitheatre situated in the middle of the village for musicians and other performances. The enterprise’s director stated that in 2009 the village received a half million visitors.^{[95][135][136]}

Special exhibitions[edit]

• 

  The Little Prince as part of a street art project in Funchal (Madeira)

  In 1996 the Danish sculptor Jens Galschiøt unveiled an artistic arrangement consisting of seven blocks of granite asteroids ‘floating’ in a circle around a 2-metre tall planet Earth. The artistic universe was populated by bronze sculpture figures that the little prince met on his journeys. As in the book, the prince discovers that «the essential is invisible to the eye, and only by the heart can you really see». The work was completed at the start of 1996 and placed in the central square of Fuglebjerg, Denmark,^[137] but was later stolen from an exhibition in Billund in 2011.^[138]

• During 2009 in São Paulo, Brazil, the giant Oca Art Exhibition Centre presented The Little Prince as part of The Year of France and The Little Prince. The displays covered over 10,000 square metres on four floors, examining Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince and their philosophies, as visitors passed through theme areas of the desert, different worlds, stars and the cosmos. The ground floor of the exhibit area was laid out as a huge map of the routes flown by the author and Aeropostale in South America and around the world. Also included was a full-scale replica of his Caudron Simoun, crashed in a simulated Sahara Desert.^{[139][140][141]}
• In 2012 the Catalan architect Jan Baca unveiled a sculpture in Terrassa, Catalonia showing the Little Prince along with the sentence, «It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye».^[142]
• In February 2022, nearly eight decades after it was written, «The Little Prince» has arrived in Paris. The exhibit began on February 17 and will end on June 26. It contains 600 items, including photographs, poems, and newspaper clippings relating to «The Little Prince.»^[143]

Places[edit]

Playground[edit]

• One of the «story playgrounds» – a series of playgrounds themed after famous children’s stories in Holon, Israel – is themed after The Little Prince. It features sculptures and play structures depicting scenes and characters from the book.

Schools[edit]

• L’école Le Petit Prince is the public elementary school in the small community of Genech in northern France, dedicated in 1994 upon the merger of two former schools. With nine classrooms and a library, its building overlooks the village’s Place Terre des Hommes,^[144] a square also named in tribute to Saint-Exupéry’s 1939 philosophical memoir, Terre des hommes.
• A K–6 elementary school on Avro Road in Maple, Ontario, Canada, was also opened in 1994 as L’école élémentaire catholique Le Petit Prince. Its enrollment expanded from 30 students in its first year to some 325 children by 2014. One of Saint-Exupéry’s colourful paintings of the prince is found on its website’s welcome page.^[145]

Avenue[edit]

• In southern Brazil, in the city of Florianópolis, there is the Avenida Pequeno Príncipe (Little Prince Avenue in Portuguese), whose name is a tribute to Saint-Exupéry, who passed through the city during his aviator career, an event that became part of the local culture.^[146]

Insignia and awards[edit]

• Prior to its decommissioning in 2010, the GR I/33 [fr] (later renamed as the 1/33 Belfort Squadron), one of the French Air Force squadrons Saint-Exupéry flew with, adopted the image of the Little Prince as part of the squadron and tail insignia of its Dassault Mirage fighter jets.^[147] Some of the fastest jets in the world were flown with The Prince gazing over their pilots’ shoulders.
• The Little Prince Literary Award for Persian fiction by writers under the age of 15, commemorating the title of Saint-Exupéry’s famous work, was created in Iran by the Cheragh-e Motale’eh Literary Foundation. In 2012, some 250 works by young authors were submitted for first stage review according to the society’s secretary Maryam Sistani, with the selection of the best three writers from 30 finalists being conducted in Tehran that September.^[148][149]
• Several other Little Prince Awards have also been established in Europe, meant to promote achievement and excellence in a variety of fields such as in assistance to autistic children, child literacy, children’s literature (by adults), Puppetry theatre and theatre arts.^{[150][151][152]}

Numismatics and philatelic[edit]

• Before France adopted the euro as its currency, Saint-Exupéry and drawings from The Little Prince were on the 50-franc banknote; the artwork was by Swiss designer Roger Pfund.^[75][153] Among the anti-counterfeiting measures on the banknote was micro-printed text from Le Petit Prince, visible with a strong magnifying glass.^[154] Additionally, a 100-franc commemorative coin was also released in 2000, with Saint-Exupéry’s image on its obverse, and that of the Little Prince on its reverse.^[155]
• In commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the writer’s untimely death, Israel issued a stamp honoring «Saint-Ex» and The Little Prince in 1994.^[156] Philatelic tributes have been printed in at least 24 other countries as of 2011.^[157]

Astronomy[edit]

• The B612 Foundation is a private foundation created to track Near-Earth objects that might pose a threat to Earth, and is dedicated to protecting the planet from asteroid strikes, similar to the Tunguska event of 1908. The private foundation was founded by a group of U.S. scientists and astronauts, including Clark Chapman, Piet Hut, Rusty Schweickart and Ed Lu in October 2002. The non-profit organization is named in honour of the prince’s home asteroid.^[158]
• An asteroid discovered in 1975, 2578 Saint-Exupéry, was also named after the author of The Little Prince.^[159]
• Another asteroid discovered in 1993 was named 46610 Bésixdouze, which is French for «B six twelve». The asteroid’s number, 46610, becomes B612 in hexadecimal notation. B-612 was the name of the prince’s home asteroid.
• In 2003 a small asteroid moon, Petit-Prince, discovered earlier in 1998, was named in part after The Little Prince.^[160]

The Little Prince Day[edit]

Since 2020, June 29 is International Little Prince Day. This date was chosen to commemorate the birth of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, which occurred on June 29, 1900. The Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Foundation started the initiative striving to promote the humanist values ​​carried by the book published in 1943. Mark Osborne was one of the first personalities to participate in the Little Prince Day 2020.^[161]

See also[edit]

• List of The Little Prince adaptations, a listing of The Little Prince story adapted into various media.
• The Little Prince (1974 film), a 1974 musical film directed by Stanley Donen
• The Little Prince (play), a theatrical adaptation
• The Little Prince (opera), an opera in two acts by Rachel Portman to an English libretto by Nicholas Wright
• The Adventures of The Little Prince (TV series), an anime series
• The Little Prince and the Aviator, a 1981 musical theatre adaptation
• Eloise at the Plaza, a 2003 TV film in which many references to The Little Prince can be identified
• The Little Prince (TV series), a 2010 TV series
• The Little Prince (2015 film), a 2015 animated film directed by Mark Osborne
• Le Monde‘s 100 Books of the Century
• Invisible Essence: The Little Prince, a 2018 documentary film about the book

Notes[edit]

References[edit]

Translations[edit]

• de Saint-Exupéry, Antoine (2006). The Little Prince: And Letter to a Hostage. Translated by Cuffe, T. V. F.. Penguin. ISBN 978-0-14-118562-0. OCLC 1023214985.
• ——— (6 September 2018). The Little Prince. Translated by Morpurgo, Michael. London: Vintage Children’s Classics. ISBN 9781784874179.
• ——— (30 May 2019). The Little Prince. Translated by Norminton, Gregory. Alma Classics. ISBN 978-1-84749-824-3.
• ——— (15 January 2018). The Little Prince. Translated by Testot-Ferry, Irene. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth. ISBN 978-1-84022-760-4. OCLC 1105536767.
• ——— (1943). The Little Prince. Translated by Woods, Katherine (1st ed.). New York: Reynal & Hitchcock. ISBN 9780152023980. OCLC 898880592. Retrieved 28 July 2020.

Sources[edit]

• Beaumont, Peter (1 August 2010). «Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince Poised for a Multimedia Return to Earth: The Boy Who Lived on an Asteroid Whose Tale Was Told in a Classic French Novella Is Being Revived on TV, Film And In Print». The Observer. Retrieved 15 October 2011.
• Brown, Hannibal (2004). «The Country Where the Stones Fly«. Visions of a Little Prince. Archived from the original (documentary research) on 29 March 2007. Retrieved 16 September 2011.
• Dunning, Jennifer (12 May 1989). «In the Footsteps of Saint-Exupery». The New York Times. Retrieved 14 September 2010.
• Heuré, Gilles (2006). L’insoumis: Léon Werth, 1878–1955. Paris: Éditions Viviane Hamy. ISBN 978-2878582192.
• Saint-Exupéry, Consuelo de (2003). The Tale of the Rose: The Love Story Behind The Little Prince. Translated by Allen, Esther. New York City: Random House. ISBN 978-0-8129-6717-3.
• Schiff, Stacy (1994). Saint-Exupéry: A Biography. Knopf. ISBN 978-0-679-40310-4.
• Schiff, Stacy (1996). Saint-Exupéry: A Biography. Vintage Canada. ISBN 978-0-679-30822-5.
• Schiff, Stacy (2006). Saint-Exupéry: A Biography. Henry Holt. ISBN 978-0-805-07913-5.
• Severson, Marilyn S. (2004). Masterpieces of French Literature: Greenwood Introduces Literary Masterpieces. Greenwood Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-313-31484-1.
• Webster, Paul (1993). Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: The Life and Death of The Little Prince. London: Pan Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-333-61702-1.

Further reading[edit]

• Dunn, Bruce. The Yellow Umbrella: A City Fable. Mushroom Press, 2009, ISBN 978-0615295404 (English)
• Galembert, Laurent de. La grandeur du Petit Prince (thesis), Éditions Le Manuscrit, 26 November 2002, ISBN 2-7481-1916-9 (French)

External links[edit]

• Le Petit Prince at Project Gutenberg Australia
• LePetitPrince.com (in French) Site officiel du Petit Prince; and TheLittlePrince.com Archived 26 December 2021 at the Wayback Machine Official site of The Little Prince
• NYC-ARTS Profile: The Little Prince, PBS interview on the 2014 Morgan Exhibition (video, 12:39)
• The Little Prince: A New York Story Exhibition, NBC news report on the 2014 Little Prince exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum (video, 3:10)
• Study Guide at SparkNotes
• www.petit-prince-collection.com Website dedicated to the largest collection of Little Prince books in the world. This impressive collection (nearly five thousand different editions of the full text in over 420 different languages and dialects) belongs to the Jean-Marc Probst Foundation for the Little Prince in Lausanne.
• The Little Prince excerpts and collection in 400 languages and dialects and in English
• List of different editions
• The Museum of The Little Prince in Hakone ; and 箱根の星の王子さまのミュージアム (in Japanese)
• A bibliography of biographical works on Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
• Il Piccolo Principe e Antoine De Saint-Exupéry (in Italian)
• Le Petit Prince series in Indic Languages
• Enthusiast website: The Little Prince Quotations
• The Little Prince Pictures (in Chinese)
• The Little Prince (in Arabic)
• laetaprinco.org Website dedicated to reading Little Prince online in popular languages.

Произведение Маленький принц, созданное Антуаном де Сент-Экзюпери во время второй мировой войны, принесло автору всемирную славу. Книга представляет собой философское сочинение, объединившее фантастику и реальность. Повесть считается детским произведением, однако малышам и подросткам сложно самостоятельно осознать истинную сущность повествования. Знакомство с содержанием, анализ повести помогут лучше понять смысл сказки Маленький принц.

Краткое содержание

Главные герои сказки Маленький принц – летчик и маленький мальчик. Сюжет книги начинается с детских воспоминаний летчика. Будучи ребенком, он пытался рисовать, изображая мир таким, как видел. Взрослые не поняли картинок ребенка, посоветовав больше заниматься учебой, забыв о рисовании.

Повзрослев, герой становится летчиком. Во время очередного полета у самолета выходит из строя мотор, вынуждая пилота посадить машину посередине пустыни.

Интересно! Данный эпизод описывает случай, происшедший с автором в 1935 году при совершении авиаперелета Париж-Сайгон. Самолет Антуана, мечтающего побить рекорд французского летчика Андре Жали, разбился, упав в Ливийской пустыне. Пилота, а также механика нашли и спасли бедуины.

В пустыне летчик знакомится с юным принцем, прилетевшим с астероида размером с обыкновенный дом. Мальчик очень трудолюбивый, регулярно тщательно ухаживает за планетой. Юному правителю ежедневно приходится уничтожать вредителей – побеги баобабов. Иначе разросшиеся сорные растения принесут гибель звезде.

На астероиде находится три вулкана, периодически расчищаемые юношей. Молодому правителю живется очень одиноко, его единственное развлечение – любование закатами.

Кроме юноши на планете обитает прекрасный, но чересчур капризный цветок – Роза. Маленький герой искренне любит Розу, неустанно заботясь о нежном цветке. Но слишком гордая Роза не показывала свои чувства, лишь манипулировала им.

Знакомство с соседями

Однажды молодому правителю захотелось познать окружающий мир. С помощью этого путешествия и раскрывается смысл сказки Маленький принц. Мальчик отправился путешествовать по соседним звездам.

Странствуя, юный путешественник встретил разных людей:

1. Короля, считающего себя властителем вселенной, включая звезды, солнце.
2. Честолюбца, мечтающего о всеобщем восхищении.
3. Пьяницу, стыдящегося пьянства, но продолжающего пить, желая забыться, не чувствовать стыда.
4. Делового человека, подсчитывающего звезды, желающего разбогатеть и купить светила.
5. Фонарщика, приносящего пользу планете, освещая астероид. Звезда вращается слишком быстро, однако трудолюбивый фонарщик вовремя зажигает, гасит свет.
6. Старого географа, всю жизнь прожившего на планете, мечтающего написать книгу о соседних астероидах. Ученый расспрашивает посетивших планету путешественников, записывая рассказы гостей.

Фонарщик восхищает юношу трудолюбием, преданностью родной планете. Пьяницу мальчик считает глупцом, но помочь не может. Не получается у юного путешественника переубедить счетовода, молодой герой считает существование делового человека бессмысленным. Общество самодовольного монарха, честолюбца мальчику неприятно, он быстро покидает странные планеты.

Географ советует путешественнику посетить Землю, обладающую хорошей репутацией.

Посещение Земли

Прилетев на Землю, юный правитель попадает в пустыню. Первой мальчик встречает змею. Рептилия объясняет ребенку, что на земле живет много людей, но это не всегда избавляет от одиночества.

Исследуя Землю, маленький путешественник находит сад, засаженный цветущими розами, и разочаровывается – он считал Розу единственным цветком во вселенной. Во время странствий по Земле юноше попадается стрелочник, разводящий поезда, торговец пилюлями, утоляющими жажду.

На Земле маленький герой повстречал Лиса, подружившись со зверьком. Мудрый Лис разъясняет мальчику понятия дружбы, любви. Зверек рассказывает новому другу об ответственности перед прирученной Розой.

Поведав летчику пережитые приключения, мальчик решает вернуться домой. Помогает юноше змея, укусив путешественника при нахождении астероида над пустыней.

Летчик, починив самолет, возвращается домой, где временами грустит, вспоминая маленького правителя.

Смысл произведения Сент-Экзюпери

Смысл сказки Маленький принц заключается в познании понятий добра-зла, жизни-смерти.

Антуан де Сент-Экзюпери поднимает глобальные проблемы:

• поиски смысла жизни;
• понятие истинной любви;
• взаимоотношения мужчин и женщин;
• вопросы нравственности, дружбы, ответственности.

Интересно! При описании сложных отношений юного правителя и Розы, автор отразил свои реальные взаимоотношения с женой.

Всемирное зло в произведении олицетворяют баобабы. Если не уничтожать ростки, сорные растения поглотят все живое. Это имело особенное значение в военные годы. Автор хотел сказать, что совместные усилия помогут уничтожить фашизм.

Поместив на астероиды по единственному жителю, Экзюпери стремился показать жизнь людей, существующих в собственном внутреннем мире. Они опасались выходить за пределы своего мирка, не пытаясь понять главный смысл человеческого бытия. Лишь постоянный поиск способствует познанию истины.

Автор сознательно наделил жителей астероидов отрицательными качествами, присущими многим людям:

• стремлением властвовать;
• тщеславием;
• пьянством;
• жаждой наживы.

На фоне пороков гораздо отчетливее видятся действительно истинные ценности, на которые не жалко потратить жизнь: любовь, дружба, духовное самосовершенствование.

Уроки маленького принца

Повесть наполнена глубоким философским смыслом. Суть книги Маленький принц отражают жизненные уроки, полученные юным правителем во время странствий:

1. Доверять сердцу. Глаза видят внешнюю оболочку. Внутренняя сущность распознается сердцем.
2. Быть ответственным за прирученных, стараясь выполнять данные близким обещания, не причинять боли.
3. Заботиться об окружающем мире, держа чистым дом, город, планету.
4. Стремиться осуществить мечту, даже потерпев однажды неудачу.
5. Беречь дружбу, помнить друзей.
6. Оставлять время для себя, наслаждаясь каждым мгновением жизни.

Простой язык написания сказки позволяет лучше понять, какой глубокий смысл заключен в мудрых фразах. Автор предоставляет возможность читателю вместе с персонажами сказки-притчи распознать главные ценности человеческой жизни.

Рассказ «Маленький принц» затрагивает проблемы, актуальные во все времена. Книга отражает простые истины, знание которых делает жизнь полной и насыщенной.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ «Маленький принц» за 3 минуты и подробно по главам за 7 минут. 

Для Антуана де Сент-Экзюпери  «Маленький принц» стал своеобразным дебютом.

Произведение, главным героем которого является светловолосый мальчик,  прилетевший на планету Земля, наполнено глубоким смыслом.

 Автор ставит на первое место идею о настоящих ценностях человека, становление которых происходит через детское восприятие окружающей действительности. 

Очень краткий пересказ повести «Маленький принц».

В 6 лет мальчик увидел в книге картинку, как удав глотает хищника. Позже ребенок изображает свой рисунок – змея проглатывает целиком слона. Взрослые думали, что мальчик нарисовал шляпу, ведь они всегда нуждаются в объяснениях.

Тогда мальчик нарисовал другой рисунок, но взрослые снова его не поняли и назвали творчество «ерундой». Мальчик вырос и стал летчиком. Свой первый рисунок он хранил и всем показывал. Но все взрослые, когда видели рисунок, отвечали ему, что это шляпа. Так он и жил в одиночестве –до тех пор, пока он не познакомился с Маленьким принцем.

Первая встреча произошла в пустыне, у летчика сломался самолет, и он был вынужден совершить посадку. Уставший и расстроенный, летчик уснул прямо на песке. И был удивлен, когда его разбудил чей-то голос, который просил нарисовать барашка.

Это был мальчик со светлыми волосами.  Он сказал летчику, что на его детском рисунке изображен удав и слон, чем очень удивил рассказчика. По просьбе ребенка летчик нарисовал разных барашков, малыш выбрал того, что был в деревянном ящике. Этим мальчиком был Маленький принц.

Он рассказал, что прилетел со своей планеты под названием «Астероид – 612».

Принц рассказал, что он приводит планету в порядок – прочищает три вулкана, освобождает астероид от баобабов. Одиночество было его спутником до тех пор, пока на планете не появилась Роза. Принц полюбил капризный цветок.

Перед отъездом Маленького принца, цветок признался ему в любви.

На астероидах Маленький принц встречает короля, честолюбца, пьяницу, делового человека, фонарщика, географа. Фонарщик принцу понравился, к тому же на астероиде, где жил фонарщик, можно было любоваться закатом больше тысячи раз в сутки. Географ  сказал, что горы и моря вечны, а цветы живут мало. Тогда Маленький принц понял, что его Роза скоро исчезнет.

Следующим пунктом его странствий была планета Земля. Маленький принц подружился на Земле с Лисом, змеей и летчиком. Змея говорит, что может помочь принцу, если он захочет вернуться на свою планету. А Лис объясняет, что значит настоящая дружба.

Маленький принц принимает решение вернуться к Розе. Тот цветок нуждается в его внимании и заботе.

Как раз в этот момент происходит встреча с летчиком. Принц находит змею и просит о помощи. Мальчик говорит пилоту, что змея должна будет его укусить. Маленький принц предупредил летчика, что момент его ухода будет похож на мертвого, но это не так. Укус змеи — лишь способ вернуться. Он отправится к звездам, поэтому переживать не стоит.

Рассказчику Маленький принц посоветовал не грустить, а вспоминать его. Ведь грустить не о чем, он возвращается домой.

Летчик починил свой сломанный самолет. Только иногда он волновался, вспоминая о принце. Ведь он нарисовал барашка и намордник для него, а ремешок к наморднику нарисовать забыл. И теперь летчик переживал, что барашек мог съесть Розу. Потому что, если Роза исчезнет, то все будет по-другому. И ни один взрослый не сможет этого понять.

Главные герои и их характеристика:

•  Летчик, он же рассказчик  – взрослый человек, который по-прежнему ребенок в душе. По характеру он добрый и отзывчивый, готов помогать и сострадать. Ему присуща детская непосредственность и любознательность во всем.
•  Маленький принц  – светловолосый мальчик, прилетевший на Землю с другой планеты. Он по-взрослому рассудительный, мечтательный, иногда одинокий. Маленький принц может жертвовать собой для кого-то другого, способен любить, стремиться познавать мир.

Второстепенные герои и их характеристика:

•  Роза  – красивый и капризный цветок, появившийся на планете Маленького принца. Она горда и обидчива. Очень женственная, нуждающаяся в заботе и внимании.
•  Король  – единственный житель на своем астероиде. Думает он только о власти и хочет, чтобы ему подчинялись все вокруг.
•  Пьяница  – взрослый человек, подверженный пороку. Он пьет, потому что ему стыдно.
•  Честолюбец  – тщеславный и мечтающий о славе. Он хочет быть известным, ищет своих почитателей. Самовлюбленный и эгоистичный.
•  Деловой человек  – житель очередной планеты. Он занят бессмысленным занятием – считает звезды на небе. Это характеризует его как глупца.
•  Фонарщик  – человек слова. Он каждый день зажигает и гасит фонарь на своей планете, потому что такой уговор.
•  Географ  – считает себя важной персоной, а сам даже не выходит из своего кабинета. Ученый, который записывает все рассказы путешественников, оказавшихся на его астероиде.
•  Змея  – живое существо, которое встретилось Маленькому принцу в пустыне. Ему кажется, что змея загадочная. А сама она называет себя могущественной.
•  Лис  – мудрый и рассудительный. Принц считает его своим другом, он учит его любви и жизни, говорит, что всегда нужно быть в ответе за тех, кто тебе дорог.

Краткое содержание повести «Маленький принц» подробно по главам.

Глава 1.

Рассказчик вспоминает случай из своего детства. Однажды он нарисовал удава, который проглотил слона. Но все взрослые, видевшие рисунок, думали, что ребенок нарисовал шляпу. Мальчик нарисовал удава изнутри – это был второй рисунок. Но и тут взрослые ничего не поняли. Они посоветовали мальчику заняться изучением полезных наук и бросить заниматься ерундой.

Мальчик вырос, стал летчиком и облетел весь мир. Художником он так и не стал. Свой рисунок с удавом и слоном он всегда носил с собой. Но ни один взрослый не понял, что на нем изображено. Все по-прежнему видели шляпу. Летчик был одиноким, ему даже не с кем было поговорить.

Глава 2.

Так он и жил, пока однажды у него не сломался самолет,  и он не приземлился в пустыне Сахара. Расстроенный, он уснул прямо на песке. Разбудил его детский тоненький голосок, который просил нарисовать барашка. Голосок принадлежал золотоволосому маленькому мальчику. Это был Маленький принц. Он был первым, кто в детском рисунке летчика увидел удава, проглотившего слона.  Принц снова и снова просил нарисовать барашка, пока летчик не сделал этого.

Глава 3.

Маленький принц задавал много вопросов. О себе он рассказал только, что прилетел с планеты, где совсем мало места.

Глава 4.

Рассказчик выясняет, что планета, с которой прилетел Маленький принц, величиной с дом. Называется она «астероид В-612». Номер ей придумали скучные взрослые, только они любят цифры.

Глава 5.

Маленький принц рассказывает, как он ухаживает за своей планетой – прочищает три вулкана и выпалывает баобабы, которые постоянно вырастают. Правило Маленького принца говорит о том, что нужно встать, умыться, а потом убрать свою планету.

Глава 6.

Мальчик рассказал летчику, что иногда ему бывает очень одиноко и тогда он смотрит на закат. Так как планета маленькая, то закат можно смотреть, сколько хочешь раз. Для этого нужно передвигать по планете стул и наблюдать за солнцем.

Глава 7.

Маленький принц раскрыл летчику свою тайну. Он рассказал, что на его астероиде появился цветок, красивая и немного капризная Роза. Мальчик переживал, что барашек может съесть Розу, ведь он легко съест ростки баобабов. За цветок Маленькому принцу было страшно.

Глава 8.

Роза появилась на планете Маленького принца из ростка. Когда бутон раскрылся, то мальчик ахнул от красоты. Такая необыкновенная была Роза. Принц очень полюбил ее, ухаживал за ней, выполнял все ее прихоти. Она вела себя надменно и горделиво. И тогда Маленький принц решил отправиться в странствия по другим планетам.

Глава 9.

Перед своим отъездом, Маленький принц навел порядок на своей планете. А Роза огорчилась, что он покидает их астероид и даже призналась принцу в любви.

Глава 10.

На первой планете Маленького принца встретил король. Он жил один. Но все время отдавал приказы и хотел, чтобы все ему подчинялись. Даже закат на этой планете можно было посмотреть лишь по приказу короля. Маленькому принцу стало скучно. И он оставил полетел дальше.

Глава 11.

На втором астероиде принц повстречал честолюбец. Маленькому принцу он не очень понравился, мальчик подумал, что он странный. Честолюбец хотел чтобы им все восхищались и мечтал о славе.

Глава 12.

Третья планета познакомила Маленького принца с пьяницей. Человек пил, чтобы забыть, что ему было стыдно из-за того, что он пил. Принцу он показался жалким.

Глава 13.

На четвертой планете жил деловой человек. На самом деле, его единственным делом был пересчет звезд на небе. Принц посчитал это занятие бесполезным.

Глава 14.

Фонарщик, живший на пятом астероиде, понравился принцу тем, что выполнял свои обещания. Он зажигал и гасил фонарь каждый миг. Принцу даже захотелось остаться и дружить с фонарщиком, ведь он занимался полезным делом.

Глава 15.

Географ, с которым принц познакомился на шестой планете, рассказал ему, что цветы не вечны и живут мало. Это расстроило Маленького принца, он вспомнил про свою Розу, которую он оставил. Но все равно мальчик решил путешествовать дальше, несмотря на свою тоску по ней.

Глава 16.

Земля, на которую прилетел Маленький принц, оказалась огромной и необыкновенной планетой. На ней насчитывается около 2 миллиардов взрослых.

Глава 17.

На Земле Маленький принц встретил змею и рассказал ей, что ему бывает одиноко на его планете. Змея заметила, что на Земле тоже бывает одиноко. Она пообещала помочь принцу, как только тот заскучает по своей планете. Змея называла себя всемогущей и говорила загадками.

Глава 18.

Маленький принц встречается с цветком. Цветок думает, что людей носит ветер, ведь у них нет корней.

Глава 19.

Маленький принц забирается на гору, но его желание увидеть планету полностью не сбывается. Он видит только скалы. От этого он грустнеет и огорчается.

Глава 20.

Мальчик видит сад с розами. Он удивляется, что его Роза не одна во всем мире. Он расстраивается, что она не особенная, садится на траву и плачет.

Глава 21.

В повести появляется Лис. Он рассказывает Маленькому принцу про дружбу, говорит, что «мы в ответе за тех, кого приручили», рассказывает, что «зорко только сердце». И мальчик понимает, что он ответственный за свою Розу.

Глава 22.

На пути Маленького принца попадается стрелочник. Он не может ответить на вопрос Маленького принца, чего ищут люди. И принц решает, что только дети знают, чего они хотят.

Глава 23.

Принц встречает торговца пилюлями, которые утоляют жажду. Они экономят время, в неделю можно сэкономить 53 минуты. На вопрос, куда потратить эти минуты, торговец не знал ответа.

Глава 24.

Летчик допил всю воду, которая у него была. Вместе с принцем они отправляются на поиски колодца. Под утро летчик, неся принца на руках, находит колодец с водой.

Глава 25.

Принц пьет воду из колодца и рассказывает, что с момента, как он оказался на Земле прошел ровно год. Рассказчик понимает, что Маленький принц хочет вернуться на свою планету.

Глава 26.

Летчик увидел, как Маленький принц разговаривает со змеей и забеспокоился. Но мальчик сообщил, что возвращается домой. Принц сказал, что он будет на своей планете. И летчик может слышать его смех, когда будет смотреть на звезды. Расставаться обоим было тяжело.

Глава 27.

Прошло 6 лет, рассказчик немного утешился. Он действительно полюбил смотреть на звезды, ему казалось, что они умеют смеяться.

История создания произведения «Маленький принц».

Автор книги переживал не самые лучшие времена – он попал под сокращение на работе, потерял друга, не мог дождаться выхода фильма по своей книге. Он сидел в кафе со своим знакомым редактором и рисовал на скатерти маленького мальчика.

Когда товарищ спросил, кого он нарисовал, Антуан ответил, что это его друг, которого он давно придумал. И тогда редактор предложил написать Экзюпери книгу для детей.  Над сказочной повестью писатель трудился 9 месяцев, и она спасла его от депрессии. Напечатана впервые книга была в 1943 году на английском языке.

С момента первого издания повести в 1943 году она входит в число самых читаемых в мире. Ее автор, французский летчик и писатель, – взрослый, так и оставшийся в душе ребенком. Чтобы представлять смысл и главную мысль повести предлагаем прочитать краткое содержание «Маленький принц» по главам онлайн.

Книга «Маленький принц» рассказывает о необыкновенной встрече пилота с Маленьким принцем, гостем с другой планеты. Это произведение входит в программу литературы 6 класса. «Маленький принц» краткое содержание – повесть по форме и сказка по сюжету, повествование всем понятным языком о серьезных и вечных вопросах: любви, дружбе, верности и ответственности за близких.

Основные персонажи повести

Главные герои:

• Рассказчик – летчик, совершивший вынужденную посадку в Сахаре, взрослый, оставшийся в душе ребенком.
• Маленький принц – мальчик, живущий на маленькой планете и однажды отправившийся в путешествие. Он знакомится с разными взрослыми, кажущимися такими странными – сам он видит мир совсем по-другому.

Другие персонажи:

• Роза – любимый цветок Маленького принца, существо капризное и гордое.
• Король – правитель, для которого главное в жизни – власть. Всех людей считает своими подданными.
• Честолюбец – обитатель одной из планет, считающий себя самым лучшим, умным и богатым, а всех людей – своими почитателями.
• Пьяница – взрослый, который пьет, стараясь забыть, что ему стыдно от того, что он пьет.
• Деловой человек – человек, постоянно считающий звезды. Думает, что достаточно первым назвать себя владельцем звезд, чтобы действительно им быть.
• Фонарщик – житель самой маленькой планеты, на которой побывал Маленький принц, каждую секунду зажигает и гасит свой фонарь.
• Географ – ученый, ничего не знающий о своей прекрасной планете, потому что никогда не выходит из кабинета. Записывает рассказы путешественников.
• Змея – первое живое существо, увиденное Маленьким принцем на Земле. Ему кажется, что змея говорит загадками. Предлагает помочь мальчику, когда он станет скучать по своему дому.
• Лис – друг, открывший Маленькому принцу множество тайн жизни. Лис учит его дружбе и любви.

О чем повесть «Маленький принц» Сент-Экзюпери?

Маленький принц краткое содержание для читательского дневника:

Пилот самолета вынужден осуществить экстренную посадку в пустыне Сахара. Там он встречает Маленького принца, который является инопланетянином. Тот рассказывает летчику о своих путешествиях, жизни дома.

Там он оставил Розу, красавицу с шипами, которую полюбил. На астероиде В‑612 располагаются 3 вулкана. Принц ухаживает за планетой, вовремя прорывая баобабы. Испытав чувство скуки, он решил путешествовать по Вселенной.

Встречался с разными персонажами, например с честолюбцем, пьяницей, королем, фонарщиком, географом, лисом. От них почерпнул много ценного, посетил еще раз Землю и умер от укуса змеи. Летчик же починил самолет и улетел домой, но встреча с Маленьким принцем создала переворот в его душе.

Вывод

Повесть имеет под собой глубокий смысл. Если человек вспомнит свое детство, это добавит осмысленности жизни. Часто дети видят те вещи, что взрослый человек попросту не замечает. Когда люди вырастают их воображение терпит крах, они не верят в чудеса.

Порой, занимаясь повседневной жизнь люди упускают вещи поважнее. Фраза, которая известна многим — «мы в ответе за тех, кого приручили», помогает увидеть, как важно ценить близких и друзей.

Сент-Экзюпери «Маленький принц» читать полностью.

Короткий пересказ «Маленький принц»

Краткое содержание «Маленький принц» Сент-Экзюпери:

В шесть лет мальчик прочитал о том, как удав глотает свою жертву, и нарисовал змею, проглотившую слона. Это был рисунок удава снаружи, однако взрослые утверждали, что это шляпа. Взрослым всегда нужно все объяснять, поэтому мальчик сделал ещё один рисунок — удава изнутри.

Тогда взрослые посоветовали мальчику бросить эту ерунду — по их словам, следовало побольше заниматься географией, историей, арифметикой и правописанием. Так мальчик отказался от блестящей карьеры художника.

Ему пришлось выбрать другую профессию: он вырос и стал лётчиком, но по-прежнему показывал свой первый рисунок тем взрослым, которые казались ему разумнее и понятливее остальных, — и все отвечали, что это шляпа. С ними нельзя было говорить по душам — об удавах, джунглях и звёздах. И лётчик жил в одиночестве, пока не встретил Маленького принца.

Это произошло в Сахаре. Что-то сломалось в моторе самолёта: лётчик должен был исправить его или погибнуть, потому что воды оставалось только на неделю. На рассвете лётчика разбудил тоненький голосок — крошечный малыш с золотыми волосами, неведомо как попавший в пустыню, попросил нарисовать ему барашка.

Изумлённый лётчик не посмел отказать, тем более что его новый друг оказался единственным, кто сумел разглядеть на первом рисунке удава, проглотившего слона. Постепенно выяснилось, что Маленький принц прилетел с планетки под названием «астероид В‑612» — разумеется, номер необходим только для скучных взрослых, которые обожают цифры.

Вся планета была величиной с дом, и Маленькому принцу приходилось ухаживать за ней: каждый день прочищать три вулкана — два действующих и один потухший, а также выпалывать ростки баобабов. Лётчик не сразу понял, какую опасность представляют баобабы, но потом догадался и, чтобы предостеречь всех детей, нарисовал планету, где жил лентяй, который не выполол вовремя три кустика.

А вот Маленький принц всегда приводил свою планету в порядок. Но жизнь его была печальной и одинокой, поэтому он очень любил смотреть на закат — особенно когда ему бывало грустно.

Он делал это по нескольку раз на дню, просто передвигая стул вслед за солнцем. Все изменилось, когда на его планете появился чудесный цветок: это была красавица с шипами — гордая, обидчивая и простодушная. Маленький принц полюбил её, но она казалась ему капризной, жестокой и высокомерной — он был тогда слишком молод и не понимал, как озарил его жизнь этот цветок. И вот Маленький принц прочистил в последний раз свои вулканы, вырвал ростки баобабов, а затем простился со своим цветком, который только в момент прощания признался, что любит его.

Он отправился странствовать и побывал на шести соседних астероидах. На первом жил король: ему так хотелось иметь подданных, что он предложил Маленькому принцу стать министром, а малыш подумал, что взрослые — очень странный народ. На второй планете жил честолюбец, на третьей — пьяница, на четвёртой — деловой человек, а на пятой — фонарщик.

Все взрослые показались Маленькому принцу чрезвычайно странными, и только Фонарщик ему понравился: этот человек оставался верен уговору зажигать по вечерам и гасить по утрам фонари, хотя планета его настолько уменьшилась, что день и ночь менялись ежеминутно. Не будь здесь так мало места. Маленький принц остался бы с Фонарщиком, потому что ему очень хотелось с кем-нибудь подружиться — к тому же на этой планете можно было любоваться закатом тысячу четыреста сорок раз в сутки!

На шестой планете жил географ. А поскольку он был географом, ему полагалось расспрашивать путешественников о тех странах, откуда они прибыли, чтобы записывать их рассказы в книги. Маленький принц хотел рассказать о своём цветке, но географ объяснил, что в книги записывают только горы и океаны, потому что они вечны и неизменны, а цветы живут недолго.

Лишь тогда Маленький принц понял, что его красавица скоро исчезнет, а он бросил её одну, без защиты и помощи! Но обида ещё не прошла, и Маленький принц отправился дальше, однако думал он только о своём покинутом цветке.

Седьмой была Земля — очень непростая планета! Достаточно сказать, что на ней насчитывается сто одиннадцать королей, семь тысяч географов, девятьсот тысяч дельцов, семь с половиной миллионов пьяниц, триста одиннадцать миллионов честолюбцев — итого около двух миллиардов взрослых. Но Маленький принц подружился только со змейкой, Лисом и лётчиком. Змея обещала помочь ему, когда он горько пожалеет о своей планете. А Лис научил его дружить.

Каждый может кого-то приручить и стать ему другом, но всегда нужно быть в ответе за тех, кого приручил. И ещё Лис сказал, что зорко одно лишь сердце — самого главного глазами не увидишь. Тогда Маленький принц решил вернуться к своей розе, потому что был за неё в ответе. Он отправился в пустыню — на то самое место, где упал.

Так они с лётчиком и познакомились. Лётчик нарисовал ему барашка в ящичке и даже намордник для барашка, хотя раньше думал, что умеет рисовать только удавов — снаружи и изнутри. Маленький принц был счастлив, а лётчику стало грустно — он понял, что его тоже приручили.

Потом Маленький принц нашёл жёлтую змейку, чей укус убивает в полминуты: она помогла ему, как и обещала. Змея может всякого вернуть туда, откуда он пришёл, — людей она возвращает земле, а Маленького принца вернула звёздам. Лётчику малыш сказал, что это только с виду будет похоже на смерть, поэтому печалиться не нужно — пусть лётчик вспоминает его, глядя в ночное небо. И когда Маленький принц рассмеётся, лётчику покажется, будто все звезды смеются, словно пятьсот миллионов бубенцов.

Лётчик починил свой самолёт, и товарищи обрадовались его возвращению. С той поры прошло шесть лет: понемногу он утешился и полюбил смотреть на звезды. Но его всегда охватывает волнение: он забыл нарисовать ремешок для намордника, и барашек мог съесть розу. Тогда ему кажется, что все бубенцы плачут. Ведь если розы уже нет на свете, все станет по-другому, но ни один взрослый никогда не поймёт, как это важно.

Читайте также роман «Принц и нищий» Твена, который был написан в 1881 году. Для читательского дневника и подготовки к уроку литературы рекомендуем прочитать краткое содержание «Принц и нищий» по главам.

Содержание «Маленький принц» по главам

Краткое содержание Маленький принц читать по главам:

Глава 1

В детстве рассказчик нарисовал свою первую картинку: удава, который проглотил слона. Взрослые, видевшие рисунок, решили, что на нем изображена шляпа, и посоветовали мальчику вместо рисования заняться географией и другими науками. Из-за этого ребенок потерял веру в себя.

Он выбрал профессию летчика, и облетел почти весь мир. Он встречался с разными взрослыми людьми. Как только казалось, что человек говорит с ним «на одном языке», показывал ему свой детский рисунок – тот самый, с удавом и слоном,- но все без исключения видели на рисунке только шляпу. И тогда рассказчику ничего не оставалось, как говорить с ними о политике, галстуках и других вещах, которыми они жили. По душам же говорить было не с кем.

Глава 2

Так рассказчик и жил в одиночестве, пока однажды поломка в моторе не заставила его посадить самолет в пустыне. На рассвете уснувшего летчика разбудил неизвестно откуда взявшийся маленький человечек. Он просил нарисовать ему барашка. Герой нарисовал ту единственную картинку, которую умел. Каково же было его изумление, когда мальчик воскликнул, что ему не нужен слон в удаве!

Пробуя раз за разом нарисовать такого барашка, которого ждал малыш, пилот потерял терпение и нарисовал коробку. Малыш остался очень доволен – ведь он смог увидеть там своего барашка.

Таким было знакомство рассказчика с Маленьким принцем.

Главы 3–4

Малыш задавал множество вопросов, но когда летчик спрашивал о нем самом, тот делал вид, что не слышит. Из обрывков полученной информации стало понятно, что ребенок с другой планеты, и планета эта очень мала. Подумав, пилот решил, что его дом – астероид В612, замеченный в телескоп лишь однажды – таким маленьким он был.

Глава 5

Мало-помалу летчик узнавал что-нибудь о жизни Маленького принца. Так, однажды стало известно, что в доме малыша тоже бывают неприятности. Среди растений часто встречаются баобабы. Если вовремя не отличить их ростки от других и не выполоть, они быстро погубят планету, разорвав ее своими корнями на части.

Чтобы этого не случилось, у Маленького принца было твердое правило: «Встал поутру, умылся, привел себя в порядок – и сразу же приведи в порядок свою планету».

Глава 6

Постепенно стало понятно, что малышу часто бывало печально на своей планете. Если «станет очень грустно, хорошо поглядеть, как заходит солнце», – рассказал Маленький принц. Был день, когда мальчик смотрел на небо больше сорока раз…

Глава 7

На пятый день знакомства летчик узнал тайну Маленького принца. На его планете жил необыкновенный цветок, котрого не было ни у кого в мире. Ему было страшно, что когда-нибудь, барашек, который уничтожает ростки баобабов, съест любимое растение.

Глава 8

Скоро рассказчик узнал о цветке больше. У Маленького принца как-то раз появился крохотный росток, не похожий на другие цветы. Со временем на нем вырос бутон, который долго не раскрывался. Когда же все лепестки открылись, малыш с восхищением увидел настоящую красавицу. У нее оказался трудный характер: гостья была тонкой и гордой натурой. Мальчик, принимавший близко к сердцу все, что говорила красавица, почувствовал себя несчастным и решил бежать, отправившись в путешествие.

Рассказывая историю о цветке, Малыш уже понимал, что «надо было судить не по словам, а по делам», – ведь красавица напоила ароматом планету, а он не умел радоваться этому и «не умел любить».

Глава 9

Перед путешествием мальчик тщательно убрал свою планету. Когда он прощался с прекрасной гостьей, та вдруг попросила прощения, пожелала ему счастья и призналась, что любит Маленького принца.

Главы 10–11

Совсем близко от планеты малыша находились несколько астероидов, он решил побывать там и чему-нибудь научиться.

На первой планете жил король. Монарх отдавал только выполнимые приказания. По этой причине нужно было ждать точного времени, чтобы увидеть заход солнца. Маленький принцу стало скучно – ему нужно было видеть солнечный закат, когда хочется, по зову сердца.

На второй планете обитал честолюбец, думавший, что все им восхищаются. Желание честолюбца быть умнее, красивее и богаче всех показалось мальчику странным.

Главы 12–13

Третья планета принадлежала пьянице. Маленький принц был в недоумении, услышав, что тот пил, чтобы забыть о том, как ему стыдно из-за того, что он пьет.

Хозяином четвертой планеты был деловой человек. Он был занят всегда: пересчитывал звезды в уверенности, что владеет ими. От него, по мнению героя, не было никакой пользы.

Главы 14–15

На самой маленькой планете жил фонарщик, зажигавший и гасивший фонарь каждый миг. Занятие его было полезным, по мнению малыша, потому что фонарщик думал не только о себе.

Герой побывал и на планете географа. Ученый записывал рассказы путешественников, сам же никогда не видел морей, пустынь и городов.

Главы 16–17

Седьмой планетой, на которой оказался Маленький принц, стала Земля, и она была огромна.

Поначалу малыш никого не увидел на планете, кроме змеи. От нее он узнал, что не только в пустыне, но и среди людей тоже бывает одиноко. Змея пообещала ему помочь в тот день, когда мальчик загрустит о своем доме.

Глава 18

Бродя по пустыне, герой встретил маленький непривлекательный цветок. Цветок не знал, где искать людей – за всю жизнь он видел их всего несколько и думал, что их носит ветром, ведь у людей не было корней.

Глава 19

Взобравшись на гору, попавшуюся на пути, Маленький принц надеялся увидеть всю Землю и всех людей. Но вместо этого увидел только скалы и услышал эхо. «Странная планета!» – решил малыш, и ему стало грустно.

Глава 20

Как то маленький герой увидел сад с множеством роз. Они были похожи на его красавицу, и малыш остановился, пораженный. Оказалось, его цветок – не единственный в мире и вовсе не особенный. Больно было об этом думать, он сел в траву и заплакал.

Глава 21

В этот момент появился Лис. Маленький принц собирался подружиться, но оказалось, сначала животное нужно приручить. Тогда «мы станем нужны друг другу… Моя жизнь словно солнцем озарится», – говорил Лис.

Лис научил малыша, что «узнать можно только те вещи, которые приручишь», а «чтобы приручить, надо запастись терпением». Он открыл мальчику важную тайну: «Зорко одно лишь сердце. Главного глазами не увидишь» и попросил помнить закон: «ты навсегда в ответе за всех, кого приручил». Маленький принц понял: красавица-роза дороже всего, он отдавал ей все свое время и силы и он в ответе за розу – ведь он приручил ее.

Глава 22

Идя дальше, Маленький принц встретил стрелочника, который сортировал пассажиров. Малыш спросил его, куда и зачем едут люди, что ищут? Ответа не знал никто, и герой решил, что «одни только дети знают, чего ищут».

Глава 23

Потом мальчик увидел торговца, который продавал усовершенствованные пилюли. Благодаря этому можно было сэкономить почти час в неделю, примешь одну пилюлю – и неделю не надо пить. Будь у малыша столько свободных минут, он бы просто отправился к живому роднику…

Глава 24

Пилот выпил последние остатки воды. Вдвоем мальчик и взрослый отправились в путь на поиски колодца. Когда малыш устал, его утешали мысли о том, что где-то есть его цветок, а пустыня прекрасна тем, что в ней скрываются родники. После слов малыша о пустыне рассказчик понял, что за таинственный свет видел он над песками: «Будь то дом, звезды или пустыня, – самое прекрасное в них то, чего не увидишь глазами».

На рассвете пилот с мальчиком на руках дошел до колодца.

Глава 25

Летчик дал малышу напиться. Вода была, «как подарок сердцу», она «родилась из долгого пути под звездами, из скрипа ворота, из усилий рук».

Теперь друзья говорили на одном языке и оба знали, что для счастья нужно совсем немного.

Главный герой понял, что малыш хочет вернуться домой.

Глава 26

Починив мотор, пилот вернулся к колодцу на следующий вечер и увидел, что Маленький принц разговаривает со змеей. Летчику стало очень страшно за малыша. После сообщения, что ночью он сможет вернуться домой и защитить розу, мальчик стал очень серьезным. Он обещал подарить своему взрослому другу особенные звезды. «У каждого человека свои звезды» – звезды летчика будут уметь смеяться.

Совсем скоро возле Маленького принца мелькнула змейка, укусив его, и он упал беззвучно и медленно.

Глава 27

Летчик никому никогда не рассказывал о Маленьком принце. Он знал – малыш вернулся в свой дом, ведь наутро на песке его не было. И теперь рассказчик любит смотреть и слушать звезды, они то тихо смеются, то плачут.

Читайте также рассказ «Гаврош» – это отрывок из романа В. Гюго «Отверженные», который написан в  1862 году. Произведение изучают на уроках литературы в 5–7‑х классах. На нашем сайте можно прочитатать краткое содержание «Гавроша» для читательского дневника.

Видео краткое содержание Маленький принц Сент-Экзюпери

Рассказывая о путешествии героя, автор говорит с нами о вечных человеческих ценностях, о важности сохранять в жизни детскую чистоту и наивность, о настоящем восприятии мира. Изучив краткий пересказ «Маленького принца», познакомившись с сюжетом и героями, можно двигаться дальше: читать полный текст и почувствовать жизнеутверждающее начало сказки, где взрослый герой начал слышать звезды и видеть мир по-новому.