Original manuscript of ‘The Little Prince’ returns to France 75 years later

fans of The little Prince have a reason to visit Paris: the Museum of Decorative Arts dedicates the largest retrospective in French history to the book of Antoine de Saint-Exupérya small work of art that has crossed borders and whose original drawings can now be seen for the first time.

The exhibition, which opens its doors this Thursday, shows more than 600 documents around the illustrated book that the writer published in 1943, although it did not arrive in France until 1946, after the death of the author and pilot of the French Resistance, who crashed in the Mediterranean in 1944 under mysterious circumstances.

“It is the most important exhibition that has been held because in it we find for the first time in the world since 1943 the original drawings of The little Prince, dressed in majesty, with his yellow scarf; and for the first time in France we see the original manuscript”account to Eph the great-nephew of the writer, Olivier d’Agay.

The exhibition begins with documents from Saint-Exupéry’s childhood, born into an aristocratic family in Lyon in 1900, interested in writing and illustration since childhood, as well as in the emerging world of aviation, in which was a pioneer.

His experiences as a pilot, first in the postal service, with which he traveled through Africa and later Latin America (he was director of Aeroposta Argentina in 1929), and his work as a reporter are the origin of his novels. Courier Southadapted to the cinema at the time, vol de night Y Terre des Hommes.

The latter was created as a result of the accident that Saint-Exupéry suffered in 1935 with his mechanic. Andre Prevoton a flight between Paris and Saigon, remaining trapped in the Sahara desert for several days, in the Libyan area, an experience that was also at the origin of The little Prince.

“He said that he could only tell what he had experienced, he could not make fiction. So he wrote from lived material. In the second part of his life, more than a writer he was a philosopher and The little Prince He drinks from both currents, it is the fruit of his experience and his reflections on society, humanity”, says his descendant.

D’Agay, a philanthropist dedicated to taking his ancestor’s work around the world, points out that during his lifetime Saint-Exupéry was a kind of legendary hero, a legend that was amplified after his disappearance at sea, which even gave rise to rumors about a possible suicide.

A life lesson

But more than half of the rooms are devoted exclusively to his crowning work, this little book of barely a hundred pages illustrated with watercolors by the writer himself and which has become the most translated in the world after the Bible, being used as a learning tool and even for the recovery of dialects in danger of extinction.

It was, for example, the first book published in Toba, the language of this ethnic people from northern Argentina.

His wife, the Salvadoran Consuelo Suncín-Sandoval Zeceña, with whom he had a somewhat stormy relationship, also appears in the exhibition as his great romance and source of inspiration for the rose, a symbol of love that the protagonist tries to protect.

That many of these drawings have not seen the light before is another mystery in the history of Saint-Exupéry.

Their owners had not wanted to show them until now, as had happened with the original manuscript, only previously exhibited in New York, in 2014, where it is kept by the Morgan Library & Museum.

The exhibition, which should have been held in 2021 but had to be postponed due to the pandemic, is part of the 75th anniversary of the publication of the book in France and will remain open until June 26.

“The little Prince touches our innermost feelings”argues his nephew. “People find in him consolation in the face of their sadness, hope, answers to existential questions. It is not a question of generations, religion or times, it is timeless, universal”. (I)