The Little Prince

A fable for children and adults

The Little Prince is a short illustrated book by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, a French writer and pilot. It was first published in April 1943 in New York, in English and in French (Le Petit Prince), while the author was living in exile in the United States during the Second World War. He drew the watercolor pictures himself. In July 1944, he disappeared on a reconnaissance flight over the Mediterranean and was never found. He did not live to see the book published in liberated France.

Saint-Exupéry had flown mail routes over the Sahara and, in 1935, crashed in the Libyan desert with his mechanic. They nearly died of thirst before a Bedouin found them. The book's frame story draws on that experience.

The book is dedicated to his friend Léon Werth, a Jewish writer then hiding in occupied France. In the dedication, Saint-Exupéry apologizes to children for giving the book to a grown-up, then dedicates it instead to the child Werth once was. The theme is set: grown-ups have forgotten how to see.

The Little Prince is one of the most translated books in the world, available in hundreds of languages. In English, the first translation is by Katherine Woods (1943). A newer one by Richard Howard (2000) is also common. The book is short, about 27 chapters and under 100 pages with the drawings.

The narrator and the drawing of a sheep

The narrator begins with a memory. At six, he drew a boa constrictor that had swallowed an elephant. Grown-ups looked at it and saw a hat. They told him to give up drawing and study geography, arithmetic and grammar. He became a pilot. All his life he showed the drawing to adults to test them. They always saw a hat. So he talked to them about bridge, golf and neckties.

Six years before he writes the story, his plane broke down in the Sahara, a thousand miles from anyone, with water for about eight days. On the first morning, a small voice woke him. It asked him to draw a sheep.

The boy rejects every sheep the narrator draws: one is sick, one is a ram, one is too old. At last the narrator draws a box with air holes and says the sheep is inside. The boy is delighted. This is the little prince. The narrator learns slowly that he comes from a planet barely bigger than a house. The narrator believes it is asteroid B-612, seen once by a Turkish astronomer. The narrator explains that he gives the number only because grown-ups love numbers.

The baobabs, the sunsets and the rose

On his tiny planet, the prince has three volcanoes, two active and one extinct, which he cleans out each morning. He also must pull up baobab seedlings every day. If he lets one grow, its roots will split the planet apart. The narrator says this is a lesson about dealing with bad things while they are small.

The prince is often sad. Because his planet is so small, he can watch many sunsets in one day by moving his chair a few steps. He tells the narrator that one day he watched dozens of them. When you are very sad, he says, you love sunsets.

The prince's great love is a rose that grew from a seed blown in from somewhere. She is beautiful and vain. She has four thorns and is proud of them. She coughs to make him feel guilty, asks for a screen against drafts and a glass globe for the night. He takes her demands too seriously and feels miserable. He decides to leave. When he says goodbye, she admits that she loves him and tells him to go quickly. He later sees he should have judged her by her acts, not her words. Her fragrance and beauty filled his planet.

The narrator learns all this in pieces over the first days. One day the prince asks if sheep eat flowers, even ones with thorns. The narrator, busy with his engine, answers carelessly that thorns are useless and that he is busy with matters of consequence. The prince is furious and in tears. He says that a man who has never loved a flower is not a man but a mushroom. The narrator puts down his tools and holds him.

Six planets, six grown-ups

On his way to Earth, the prince visits six asteroids. Each has one inhabitant, and each shows an adult folly.

• A king who rules over nothing, gives only orders that will be obeyed anyway, and orders the sun to set at sunset.
• A conceited man who wants only to be admired and hears nothing but praise.
• A drunkard who drinks to forget that he is ashamed of drinking.
• A businessman who counts the stars all day, claims to own them, and writes their number on paper to put in a bank.
• A lamplighter on a planet that turns once a minute, so he lights and puts out his lamp every minute, faithful to an order that no longer makes sense. The prince likes him best, because he cares about something besides himself.
• A geographer who records mountains and rivers but never leaves his desk to explore. He tells the prince that flowers are ephemeral and not worth recording. The prince learns that his rose will not last forever and feels his first regret.

The geographer advises him to visit Earth.

Earth: the snake, the roses and the fox

The prince lands in the African desert. The first creature he meets is a yellow snake, coiled like a gold bracelet. The snake says he can send anyone back to the earth from which he came, and that he can help the prince one day if he misses his planet.

The prince crosses the desert and climbs a mountain, where only an echo answers him. Then he finds a garden with five thousand roses, all just like his. He had thought his rose was the only one in the universe. He lies down in the grass and cries.

Then the fox appears. The fox asks the prince to tame him. Taming, he explains, means establishing ties. To the prince, the fox is now just a fox like a hundred thousand others. Once tamed, they will need each other. Each will be unique in the world to the other. The fox also says the wheat fields mean nothing to him, but if the prince tames him, the golden wheat will remind him of the boy's hair.

The prince tames the fox by coming at the same hour each day and sitting a little closer. When it is time to leave, the fox says he will cry. The prince asks what good the taming did. The fox says it did good because of the color of the wheat.

The fox sends him back to the roses. The prince tells them they are beautiful but empty: no one would die for them. His rose matters more than all of them because she is the one he watered, sheltered and listened to. Then the fox gives him a secret. It is only with the heart that one sees rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye. It is the time you spent on your rose that makes your rose so important. You become responsible forever for what you have tamed.

The prince also meets a railway switchman, who sends trains full of people rushing in both directions, and only children press their noses to the windows. He meets a merchant who sells pills that end thirst and save fifty-three minutes a week. The prince says that if he had fifty-three minutes to spare, he would walk slowly toward a spring.