The manuscript of The Little Prince comes to France for the first time, the opportunity to expose all the imagination of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, creator of a storybook hero destined for world fame.
The exhibition “Meeting the Little Prince”, which opens today Thursday in Paris, at the Museum of Decorative Arts (MAD), until June 26, is full of pieces by the hand of the aviator writer.
The tale was written in 1942 in the United States, in New York and Asharoken, a seaside village on Long Island. When Saint-Exupéry left America in April 1943 to fight from North Africa, he gave the manuscript to his mistress, the journalist Sylvia Hamilton. She then sold it to the Morgan Library & Museum in 1968.
From this treasure, the New York institution lent the most important pages. Including the original watercolors which represent the asteroid of the Little Prince, either the cover of the book, or the Little Prince with his long coat with red lapels.
The greatest sketch
The aviator, who disappeared during a mission in the Mediterranean in July 1944, did not see the global success of this tale. But he had found his voice, his character and even his distinctive trait, following being reluctant to illustrate this book himself suggested by his publishers. So much so that at the end of its life, where the book only has American editions (in English and French), “the character and the author end up merging”, explains curator Anne Monier-Vanryb .
The exhibition shows all the depth of inspiration that will lead to this masterpiece, from childhood, since also a letter to his future wife Consuelo in 1930 where he mentions “a child who had discovered a treasure” and “became melancholy,” even to the sketches in which the hero refines himself.
“Saint-Ex” made drastic choices for his philosophical tale. To achieve the greatest purity possible, he eliminates scenes and characters: a snail, a butterfly hunter, an encounter with an old couple who chase him out of their house…
“There is always mystery around this work. All you have to do is take a sheet and you come across riddles,” underlines the other exhibition curator, Alban Cerisier.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry with Sylvia Hamilton, 1942. ©Coll. Estate of Saint-Exupéry-D’Agay
Unhappy exile
“We haven’t stopped discovering more,” he adds. A Swiss foundation, for example, lends the MAD an unsuccessful incipit, where the narrator explains that he does not know how to draw an airplane.
Saint-Exupéry reworked it extensively and then narrated the accident that caused it to crash in the Libyan desert in 1935. A gourd and a piece of aircraft recall this episode, where in the fiction the Little Prince appears to ask: “S’ please… draw me a sheep! »
Behind the luminous story of this little boy who left for an interstellar journey lies a dark story, that of an unhappy exile. “There is a painful background, of despair, in Saint-Exupéry, who does not find his place, does not feel recognized. This spoiled child has become a sentimental adult, unhappy at not being able to live a stable life, unable to create ties,” said academic Alain Vircondelet.
This one tells in A summer on Long Island, published in January by the editions of the Observatory, the writing of the tale. An “enchanted parenthesis” in a very tumultuous life as a couple, which begins with a meeting and a marriage proposal on board an airplane, the same day in 1930, and ends with a fatal reconnaissance mission for the war pilot.
Hugues HONORÉ/AFP
The manuscript of The Little Prince comes to France for the first time, the opportunity to expose all the imagination of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, creator of a storybook hero destined for world fame. The exhibition “Meeting the Little Prince”, which opens today Thursday in Paris, at the Museum of Decorative Arts (MAD), until June 26, is full of…