“The Little Prince” flies back to the Morgan Library & Museum in New York
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There are few words to fully describe the fairy-tale atmosphere, imbued with beauty and enchantment, upon entering the Morgan Library in New York: there could therefore be no better place to set up an exhibition on Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s masterpiece, translated into more than 500 languages and sold 200 million copies worldwide.
“The Little Prince: Taking Flight”, an exhibition open in the New York bookstore until February, tells unpublished stories about the famous golden-haired boy and the author’s life. Written in exile during the Second World War, Saint-Exupéry recounts his experience as a pilot, inventing a place made of lonely deserts and imaginative territories, “the saddest and most loving landscape in the world. It is here where the Little Prince appeared on Earth and then disappeared. […] It’s such a secret place, the valley of tears”.
Unpublished watercolors
The exhibition offers a series of unpublished watercolors, including characters not present in the book on the various planets – such as the butterfly hunter – but also incredibly preserved drawings and drafts of the original manuscript. Interesting are the small variations never published in the encounter of the Little Prince with the snake, “more powerful than a king’s finger” or the similarities between the 1935 plane crash that landed Saint-Exupéry in the Libyan desert and the pilot’s mirage in Sahara told in the book with “the most amazing little person ever known”.
Not only that, the first editions in English and French of “The Little Prince”, published in April 1943 by the New Yorkers Reynal and Hitchcock, are on display. The books sold in America for two dollars, with identical salmon colored covers and bindings. It is curious how the masterpiece is always associated with France, when Antoine de Saint-Exupéry moved with his wife Consuelo to New York in 1940. In French territory, however, the first edition was only published in 1946 thanks to Gallimard. The pilot-writer was also inspired by his wife to embody the symbol of the beloved rose. Theirs is a stormy relationship, full of contrasts and quarrels, exactly like the one between the Little Prince and the flower: “’But yes, I love you’, said the flower, ‘and you didn’t know it because of me. That doesn’t matter, but you were as foolish as I was. Try to be happy.’”
1968
Even the volcano of asteroid B-612 is similar to that of El Salvador, the birthplace of his wife Consuelo. In 1942 the writer, fresh from separation, met Sylvia Hamilton, the woman who will be decisive for the birth of the book, introducing it to all the New York intellectuals of the time. Sylvia herself will keep the manuscript until 1968, the year in which she will sell it to the Morgan Library & Museum, after the disappearance of Saint-Exupéry in July 1944, in flight on her Lockheed P-38 Lightning, only found in 2003 on the coast of Marseilles. An end shrouded in mystery like that of his “petit bonhomme”. And we readers, “tamed” by such a reading, still earn a wheat-colored hope today.
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