A native speaker of French, Saint-Exupéry was never able to achieve anything more than haltingly poor English. Adèle Breaux, his young Northport English tutor to whom he later dedicated a writing (“For Miss Adèle Breaux, who so gently guided me in the mysteries of the English language”), related her experiences with her famous student as Saint-Exupéry in America, 1942–1943: A Memoir, published in 1971.
“Saint-Exupéry’s prodigious writings and studies of literature sometimes gripped him, and on occasion he continued his readings of literary works until moments before take-off on solitary military reconnaissance flights, as he was adept at both reading and writing while flying. Taking off with an open book balanced on his leg, his ground crew would fear his mission would quickly end after contacting something ‘very hard’. On one flight, to the chagrin of colleagues awaiting his arrival, he circled the Tunis airport for an hour so that he could finish reading a novel. Saint-Exupéry frequently flew with a lined carnet (notebook) during his long, solo flights, and some of his philosophical writings were created during such periods when he could reflect on the world below him, becoming ‘enmeshed in a search for ideals which he translated into fable and parable’.”
Inspirations
Events and characters
In The Little Prince, its narrator, the pilot, talks of being stranded in the desert beside his crashed aircraft. The account clearly drew on Saint-Exupéry’s own experience in the Sahara, an ordeal described in detail in his 1939 memoir Wind, Sand and Stars (original French: Terre des hommes).
On 30 December 1935, at 2.45am, after 19 hours and 44 minutes in the air, Saint-Exupéry, along with his copilot-navigator André Prévot, crashed in the Sahara desert. They were attempting to break the speed record for a Paris-to-Saigon flight in a then-popular type of air race called a raid, that had a prize of 150,000 francs. Their plane was a Caudron C-630 Simoun, and the crash site is thought to have been near to the Wadi Natrun valley, close to the Nile Delta.
Both miraculously survived the crash, only to face rapid dehydration in the intense desert heat. Their maps were primitive and ambiguous. Lost among the sand dunes with a few grapes, a thermos of coffee, a single orange, and some wine, the pair had only one day’s worth of liquid. They both began to see vivid hallucinations. By the second and third days, they were so dehydrated that they stopped sweating altogether. Finally, on the fourth day, a Bedouin on a camel discovered them and administered a native rehydration treatment, which saved Saint-Exupéry’s and Prévot’s lives.
In the novella, the fox, believed to be modelled after the author’s intimate New York City friend, Silvia Hamilton Reinhardt, tells the prince that his rose is unique and special, as she is the one he loves. The novella’s iconic phrase, “One sees clearly only with the heart” is believed to have been suggested by Reinhardt.
The fearsome, grasping baobab trees, researchers have contended, were meant to represent Nazism attempting to destroy the planet. The little prince’s reassurance to the pilot that the prince’s body is only an empty shell resembles the last words of Antoine’s dying younger brother François, who told the author, from his deathbed: “Don’t worry. I’m all right. I can’t help it. It’s my body”.
Rose
Many researchers believe that the prince’s kindhearted, but petulant and vain, Rose was inspired by Saint-Exupéry’s Salvadoran wife Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry, with the small home planet being inspired by El Salvador where he crashed and stayed to recover while being within view of 3 volcanoes, one of which was Ilamatepec, also known as The Santa Ana Volcano. Despite a tumultuous marriage, Saint-Exupéry kept Consuelo close to his heart and portrayed her as the prince’s rose, whom he tenderly protects with a wind screen and places under a glass dome on his tiny planet. Saint-Exupéry’s infidelity and the doubts of his marriage are symbolized by the vast field of roses the prince encounters during his visit to Earth.
This interpretation was described by biographer Paul Webster who stated she was “the muse to whom Saint-Exupéry poured out his soul in copious letters … Consuelo was the rose in The Little Prince. “I should have judged her by her acts and not by her words”, says the prince. “She wrapped herself around me and enlightened me. I should never have fled. I should have guessed at the tenderness behind her poor ruses.”
Prince
Saint-Exupéry probably has drawn inspiration for the prince’s character and appearance from his own self as a youth, as during his early years friends and family called him le Roi-Soleil (“the Sun King”) because of his golden curly hair.[citation needed] The author had also met a precocious eight-year-old with curly blond hair while he was residing with a family in Quebec City in 1942, Thomas De Koninck, the son of philosopher Charles De Koninck. Another possible inspiration for the little prince has been suggested as Land Morrow Lindbergh, the young, golden-haired son of fellow aviator Charles Lindbergh and his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, whom he met during an overnight stay at their Long Island home in 1939.
Some have seen the prince as a Christ figure, as the child is sin-free and “believes in a life after death”, subsequently returning to his personal heaven. When Life photojournalist John Phillips questioned the author-aviator on his inspiration for the child character, Saint-Exupéry told him that one day he looked down on what he thought was a blank sheet and saw a small childlike figure: “I asked him who he was”, he replied. “I’m the Little Prince” was the reply.
One of Saint-Exupéry’s earliest literary references to a small prince is to be found in his second news dispatch from Moscow, dated 14 May 1935. In his writings as a special correspondent for Paris-Soir, the author described traveling from France to the Soviet Union by train. Late at night, during the trip, he ventured from his first-class accommodation into the third-class carriages, where he came upon large groups of Polish families huddled together, returning to their homeland. His commentary not only described a diminutive prince but also touched on several other themes Saint-Exupéry incorporated into various philosophical writings:
I sat down facing a sleeping couple. Between the man and the woman a child had hollowed himself out a place and fallen asleep. He turned in his slumber, and in the dim lamplight I saw his face. What an adorable face! A golden fruit had been born of these two peasants….. This is a musician’s face, I told myself. This is the child Mozart. This is a life full of beautiful promise. Little princes in legends are not different from this. Protected, sheltered, cultivated, what could not this child become? When by mutation a new rose is born in a garden, all gardeners rejoice. They isolate the rose, tend it, foster it. But there is no gardener for men. This little Mozart will be shaped like the rest by the common stamping machine…. This little Mozart is condemned.
— A Sense of Life: En Route to the U.S.S.R.
Background
Upon the outbreak of the Second World War, a laureate of several of France’s highest literary awards and a successful pioneering aviator prior to the war, Saint-Exupéry initially flew with a reconnaissance squadron as a reserve military pilot in the Armée de l’Air (French Air Force). After France’s defeat in 1940 and its armistice with Germany, he and Consuelo fled Occupied France and sojourned in North America, with Saint-Exupéry first arriving by himself at the very end of December 1940. His intention for the visit was to convince the United States to quickly enter the war against Nazi Germany and the Axis forces, and he soon became one of the expatriate voices of the French Resistance. In the midst of personal upheavals and failing health, he produced almost half of the writings for which he would be remembered, including a tender tale of loneliness, friendship, love and loss, in the form of a young prince visiting Earth.
An earlier memoir by the author recounted his aviation experiences in the Sahara, and he is thought to have drawn on the same experiences as plot elements in The Little Prince.
He wrote and illustrated the manuscript during the summer and fall of 1942. Although greeted warmly by French-speaking Americans and by fellow expatriates who had preceded him in New York, his 27-month stay would be marred by health problems and racked with periods of severe stress and marital strife. These included partisan attacks on the author’s neutral stance towards supporters of both ardent French Gaullist and Vichy France. Saint-Exupéry’s American translator (the author spoke poor English) wrote: “He was restless and unhappy in exile, seeing no way to fight again for his country and refusing to take part in the political quarrels that set Frenchman against Frenchman.” However, the period was to be both a “dark but productive time” during which he created three important works.
Between January 1941 and April 1943, the Saint-Exupérys lived in two penthouse apartments on Central Park South, then, at the Delamater-Bevin Mansion in Asharoken, Long Island, and still later, a rented brownstone on Beekman Place, again in New York City.
The couple also stayed in Quebec for five weeks during the late spring of 1942, where they met a precocious eight-year-old boy with blond curly hair, Thomas, the son of philosopher Charles De Koninck, with whom the Saint-Exupérys resided. During an earlier visit to Long Island
