The exhibition will have “more than 600 pieces”, including “watercolors, sketches, drawings, photographs, poems, newspaper excerpts and correspondence.
The manuscript of The little Prince, from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, never before exhibited in France, will be exhibited in Paris from February to June 2022, announced Wednesday the Museum of Decorative Arts (MAD).
The aviator and writer wrote this account in New York and Long Island, where he was in exile, between June and November 1942.
Since then, the manuscript has not left the United States: the author had left it to a friend, Silvia Hamilton, before going to North Africa during the war, in the spring of 1943. The friend sold it to the Morgan Library & Museum in 1968.
This private institution will lend the manuscript to MAD, which is hosting the exhibition To meet the little prince from February 17 to June 26 at the Louvre Palace.
The exhibition will have “More than 600 pieces”, including “watercolors, sketches and drawings – most of them unpublished – but also photographs, poems, newspaper extracts and correspondence”, the museum specified in a statement.
The little Prince, which tells the adventures on various planets of an apparently naive but philosopher boy, is one of the greatest successes in world literature.
Following its publication in French and English in New York in 1943, Saint-Exupéry died during a mission to the Mediterranean in July 1944.
Thus, the author knew nothing of the prodigious fate of this work, which was not published in France until 1946 and has now been translated into more than 300 languages.
The manuscript was exhibited in 2014 by the Morgan Library & Museum in New York.
Originally over 30,000 words long and difficult to understand, it was cut in half by a writer seeking the greatest possible simplicity of style. (I)
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