The Little Prince
By Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
This time, The grown-ups’ response was to advise me to lay aside my drawings of boa constrictors, whether from the inside or the outside, and devote myself to geography, history, arithmetic, and grammar. That is why, at the age of six, I gave up what might have been a magnificent career as a painter. I had been disheartened by the failure of my Drawing Number One and Number Two. Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to always and forever explain things to them. So then I chose another profession and learned to pilot aeroplanes. I have flown a little over all parts of the world, and geography has been advantageous. At a glance, I can distinguish China from Arizona. If one gets lost in the night, such knowledge is valuable. In the course of this life, I have had many encounters with many people who have been concerned with matters of consequence. I have lived a great deal among grown-ups. I have seen them intimately close at hand. And that hasn’t much improved my opinion of them. Whenever I met one of them who seemed clear-sighted, I tried to show him my Drawing Number One, which I have always kept. I would try to find out if this were a person of proper understanding. But, whoever it was, he or she would always say:
“That is a hat.”
Then, I would never talk to that person about boa constrictors, primaeval forests, or stars. I would bring myself down to his level. I would speak to him about bridges, golf, politics, and neckties. And the grown-up would be incredibly pleased to have met such a sensible man. So I lived my life alone, without anyone that I could talk to until I had an
accident with my plane in the Desert of the Sahara six years ago. Something was broken in my engine. As I had neither a mechanic nor any passengers with me, I set myself to attempt the complex repairs alone. It was a question of life or death for me: I had scarcely enough drinking water to last a week. I slept on the sand the first night, a thousand miles from any human habitation. I was more isolated than a shipwrecked sailor on a raft in the middle of the ocean. Thus, you can imagine my amazement at sunrise
when an odd little voice awakened me. It said:
“If you please– draw me a sheep!”
“What!”
“Draw me a sheep!”
Genre: Fiction And Literature | Young Readers
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Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Antoine Marie Jean-Baptiste Roger, Comte de Saint-Exupéry, known simply as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (29 June 1900 – 31 July 1944), was a French writer, poet, journalist and pioneering aviator.
Biography.
He received several prestigious literary awards for his novella The Little Prince (Le Petit Prince) and his lyrical aviation writings, including Wind, Sand, and Stars and Night Flight, which were translated into many languages.
Saint-Exupéry was a successful commercial pilot, working airmail routes in Europe, Africa, and South America before World War II. He joined the French Air Force at the start of the war, flying reconnaissance missions until France’s armistice with Germany in 1940. After being demobilized by the French Air Force, he travelled to the United States to help persuade its government to enter the war against Nazi Germany.
Saint-Exupéry spent 28 months in the United States of America, during which he wrote three of his most important works, then joined the Free French Air Force in North Africa, even though he was far past the maximum age for such pilots and in declining health. He disappeared and is believed to have died while on a reconnaissance mission from the French island of Corsica over the Mediterranean on 31 July 1944. Although the wreckage of his plane was discovered off the coast of Marseille in 2000, the ultimate cause of the crash remains unknown.
Literary works
While not precisely autobiographical, much of Saint-Exupéry’s work is inspired by his experiences as a pilot. One notable example is his novella, The Little Prince, a poetic tale self-illustrated in watercolours. A pilot stranded in the desert meets a young prince who has fallen to Earth from a tiny asteroid. “His most popular work, The Little Prince, was partially based upon a crash in which he and his navigator survived in the Libyan desert. They were stranded and dehydrated for four days, nearing death, when they miraculously stumbled upon a Bedouin who gave them water. Saint Exupery later wrote in Wind, Sand, and Stars that the Bedouins saved their lives and gave them “charity and magnanimity bearing the gift of water.” The Little Prince is a philosophical story, including societal criticism, remarking on the strangeness of the adult world. One biographer wrote of 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.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
