Book Report: The Little Prince

22. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince: Deluxe Pop-Up Book, translated by Richard Howard (2009) (8/27/18)

Believe it or not, I never read The Little Prince until I was recently loaned a pop-up version. This even though I actually own copies in English, French, German, and Japanese. I know the first illustration of the hat—I mean, the boa that's swallowed an elephant—intimately, because the first chapter is about as far as I ever got. Several times over the years. I don't know why I never progressed further. It's a lovely book, with lovely illustrations—all by Saint-Exupéry himself.

You, of course, know the book: I'm probably the last person on the planet not to have read it, or to have had it read to me. The crashed aviator in the middle of the Sahara; the delicate little prince who visited six planets—inhabited, respectively, by a king, a very vain man, a drunkard, a businessman, a lamplighter, and a geographer (after my own heart!)—on his way to Earth, where he hoped to learn how to take care of a perfidious, proud flower on his tiny home planet, which also boasts three knee-high volcanoes, one of them extinct. On Earth, he first meets a snake, "more powerful than a king's finger," and a fox, who teaches him about belonging.

I love the fox the best. "Please . . . tame me!" he says. The prince says he'd like to, but he doesn't have much time: he's got friends to find, so much to learn.

"The only things you learn are the things you tame," said the fox. "People haven't time to learn anything. They buy things ready-made in stores. But since there are no stores where you can buy friends, people no longer have friends. If you want a friend, tame me!"
 "What do I have to do?" asked the little prince.
 "You have to be very patient," the fox answered. "First you'll sit down a little ways away from me, over there, in the grass. I'll watch you out of the corner of my eye, and you won't say anything. Language is the source of misunderstandings. But day by day, you'll be able to sit a little closer . . ."
 The next day the little prince returned.
 "It would have been better to return at the same time," the fox said. "For instance, if you come at four in the afternoon, I'll begin to be happy by three. The closer it gets to four, the happier I'll feel. By four I'll be all excited and worried; I'll discover what it costs to be happy! But if you come at any old time, I'll never know when I should prepare my heart . . . There must be rites."
 "What's a rite?" asked the little prince.
 "That's another thing that's too often neglected," said the fox. "It's the fact that one day is different from the other days, one hour from the other hours. My hunters, for example, have a rite. They dance with the village girls on Thursdays. So Thursday's a wonderful day: I can stroll all the way to the vineyards. If the hungers danced whenever they chose, the days would all be just alike, and I'd have no holiday at all."

The prince eventually takes leave of the fox, who has promised him a secret: "It's quite simple," he says. "One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes. . . . People have forgotten this truth. But you mustn't forget it. You become responsible forever for what you've tamed."

It's a bittersweet little book, because it's about connecting and losing, but it teaches us to look into the heavens, knowing that the little prince—who could stand in for everyone we've ever known and loved and lost—is up there on his little planet taking care of his little rose (unless the sheep ate it—but let's not go there, because that's a whole other subplot . . . that actually sweetly ends the book, so perhaps you'll just have to reread it if you've forgotten how).

Here's a teaser from the publisher about the pop-up book itself: