The Little Prince: the children's book that was never only for children

Few books have suffered as much from their own success. The Little Prince has become the stuff of mugs, tote bags and greetings cards, and a single line, the one about the essential being invisible to the eye, has come to stand in for the whole thing. The actual book is stranger, funnier and considerably sadder than its merchandising.

The opening has nothing sweet about it. A pilot crashes in the Sahara with eight days of water and a fault he cannot repair. There, in the middle of nowhere, a fair-haired boy appears and asks him, with no further explanation, to draw a sheep. The conversations of the following days make up the book: the boy explains where he comes from, a tiny asteroid with three volcanoes and a rose, and what he saw on the planets he visited before reaching Earth.

Those planets are the best part. Each is home to a single adult, trapped inside his own logic: a king issuing orders to subjects he does not have, a vain man who hears only praise, a businessman counting stars so that he can call them his own. Saint-Exupéry does not quite ridicule them; he watches with a mixture of mockery and pity that keeps the satire from turning cruel. The businessman, adding up his figures without ever looking up, is uncomfortably recognisable in any office full of dashboards: counting rather than looking.

The book also has an element that quoting it tends to erase. The drawings are the author's own. His clumsy, luminous watercolours are part of the story and sometimes contradict it, starting with the first one, the snake that has swallowed an elephant and that every adult mistakes for a hat. It is worth choosing an edition that keeps them, because without them the text loses half its charm.

The context gets forgotten too. Saint-Exupéry wrote the book in 1942, in exile in New York, with France occupied and his age keeping him out of a cockpit. Read that way, the desert stops being a picturesque setting: it is where a stranded man waits for a rescue that may never come. The fox's famous lesson, that one becomes responsible for whatever one has tamed, then sounds less like a pretty phrase and more like an inventory of everything left behind.

Not all of it holds up. The round of planets becomes repetitive towards the end, and in two or three passages the moral is spelled out with a clarity the rest of the book never needs. The rose, capricious and demanding, is the character that has aged worst, and is hard to read today without some discomfort.

What has not worn out is the ending, which turns everything before it bitter and which many adult readers misremember, because as children they did not understand it. That is the key to its staying power: it can be read in an afternoon, at eight years old and at forty, and it is not the same book.

About the author

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (Lyon, 1900 – the Mediterranean, 1944) was a pilot before he was a writer, at a time when flying was still dangerous. That experience produced Night Flight and Wind, Sand and Stars. In 1935 he crashed in the Libyan desert and survived for several days, an episode that lies behind The Little Prince, published in New York in 1943. In July 1944 he took off on a reconnaissance mission and vanished over the Mediterranean. The wreckage of his aircraft was not located until more than half a century later.

To continue the series: The Tunnel by Ernesto Sabato, another short novel about the difficulty of understanding one another, and Animal Farm by George Orwell, another deceptively simple fable written for adults.