The Little Prince Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Events and characters

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 2.45am, 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 modelled 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

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 El Salvador where he crashed and stayed to recover while being within view of 3 volcanoes, one of which was Ilamatepec, also known as The Santa Ana Volcano.[36] 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

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.[37][38][39] 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.[40][41][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.[42] 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.[43]

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:[44]

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.