Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: Finding the Child Within

The book 'The Little Prince' mirrors its author's adventurous life, sense of wonder, and love of the stars

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My 3-year-old niece loves collecting trash. Whether it’s a piece of shiny plastic, a discarded box, or a pinecone she found outside, she becomes very upset when you take her treasures away. In the mind of a child, a worthless item becomes the most cherished object on earth.

This attitude makes gift-giving easy. For Christmas, I gave her “Green Eggs and Ham.” Since then, she has carried the book with her everywhere and insists that I read it to her multiple times a day. The invisible riches derived from this experience are in no way proportional to the $5 cost of the gift. In times like these, the sense of perpetual wonder a child exudes is infectious.

In another classic children’s book, “The Little Prince,” the hero meets a railway switchman who describes the behavior of people on trains: They travel very fast, don’t know where they’re going, and sleep along the way.

“They are pursuing nothing at all,” he says. “Only the children are flattening their noses against the windowpanes.”

This book’s author, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, possessed something of this childhood purity. He got along with the children of his acquaintances better than the acquaintances themselves, and his writings all express an outlook of curiosity and awe, a disposition toward beholding daily miracles.

A Life of Adventure

Saint-Exupéry ranks with Charles Lindbergh and the Wright Brothers as one of the legendary pioneers of aviation. But his material role was far smaller than other famous names in the field. Though he was an audacious pilot, he broke no flying records. Though a brilliant engineer, the 10 patents he registered were minor innovations rather than groundbreaking designs. Mostly, he just delivered mail. His most notable contribution was demonstrating the perils of early commercial flying by crashing before he reached his destinations, then publishing extraordinary tales of survival.

A poor aristocrat born in 1900 to a provincial noble house, Saint-Exupéry struggled to find a purpose in the world and longed for adventure. His family saw the young man as a lazy good-for-nothing who refused to grow up and be responsible. Aviation was a way to evade the humdrum of adult life. “He had found a twentieth-century equivalent of the life of the troubadour, the crusader, the knight-errant,” according to biographer Stacy Schiff in “Saint-Exupery: A Biography.”

Saint-Exupéry was an absentminded pilot who inexplicably survived a full catalog of probable deaths. Most famously, he once set off to break a speed record, then hit a sand dune while looking at the clouds. After walking for four days in the Libyan desert, he and his companion happened upon a Bedouin with water and a camel.

In 1944, he vanished without a trace over the Mediterranean during an Allied reconnaissance mission. Speculation surrounding the details of his presumed death continues to this day.

‘The Little Prince’

Saint-Exupéry wrote many successful books, none more so than the last one published in his lifetime. “The Little Prince” is, after the Bible, the world’s most widely translated book.

The plot is simple. A pilot crashes into the Sahara desert, where he meets a boy nicknamed “the little prince.” The Little Prince tells the pilot his story: how he lived on asteroid B-612, a tiny planet where his only friend is a single rose. He watered the rose every day and talked to it. After a quarrel with the rose, he traveled to nearby asteroids, where he met six different human adults. Then he came to earth, where he met a fox who taught him how to establish special relationships with other creatures by “taming” them. After this, the boy met the pilot. He then proceeds to help him find water in the desert, before vanishing.

The story’s charm lies in the confrontations of innocence with experience. The asteroid-dwelling adults the Little Prince met were foolish people who governed their lives through absurd logic. A businessman, who had been counting for 50 years and recently surpassed 500 million, was asked what he is referring to.

“Little golden objects that set lazy men to idle dreaming,” he told the Little Prince. In other words, stars. Why? So he can write their number down and “put them in the bank.”

The wisest characters are non-human ones. The fox delivers the book’s most famous line: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

Shortly before the Little Prince returns to his home world, he applies this wisdom by giving the pilot a “present.” Asteroid B-612 is too small to see from earth, but when the pilot looks up into the night sky, he will know that it is there. The stars are different things to different people, but the pilot will possess them as no one else does:

“In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing, when you look at the sky at night ... You—only you—will have stars that can laugh!”

And so the pilot will have a unique relationship with the stars. He will have tamed them, in a sense.

The Extraterrestrial From France

“The Little Prince,” like everything Saint-Exupéry wrote, bears striking parallels with a brief but crucial period of his life. From 1927 to 1928, Saint-Exupéry lived in a wooden shack bordering the Sahara on one side and the Atlantic on the other. He had been appointed as the chief of Cape Juby, an airfield in Morocco that operated as a stop in a French mail line. His job was to act as an ambassador to Moorish nomads, who regularly shot down planes for booty and held pilots for ransom. During his 13 months there, he flew rescue missions to retrieve downed pilots and negotiated the release of captured ones—14 in all.

He returned to France a national hero. As the years passed, the crashes multiplied with the survival stories, and Saint-Exupéry the man became “Saint-Ex,” a figure of legend.

Like the Little Prince who journeyed through the stars, Saint-Exupéry visited tents of nomads beyond Cape Juby and flew mail to Casablanca. Where the Little Prince watered his rose every morning, the lonely pilot dried his planes to prevent damage from humidity. He even tried taming a desert fox. To complete his rescue missions effectively, he often circumvented rule-bound bureaucrats of the sort the Little Prince meets on neighboring asteroids. And of course, he felt a unique bond with the sky and loved to share the invisible treasures of storytelling.

Most extraordinarily of all, Saint-Exupéry’s sudden disappearance a year after the book was published resembled the Little Prince’s. The Little Prince witnesses 44 sunsets before traveling to earth. Saint-Exupéry lived to be 44.

“You are an extraterrestrial,” a friend once told Saint-Exupéry near the end of his life, when he was living in America. The friend was probably referring to the Frenchman’s mismatched wardrobe and the fact that he only spoke a foreign language.

“Yes, yes it’s true,” he replied. “I sometimes go for walks among the stars.”