The Little Prince

Summary

The Little Prince is told by a pilot who, as a boy of six, drew a boa constrictor digesting an elephant; every grown-up who saw Drawing Number One took it for a hat, and he gave up art for flying. Years later his engine fails in the Sahara, a thousand miles from anyone, with water for about a week. At daybreak a small boy with golden hair wakes him and asks him to draw a sheep. Every sheep the pilot draws is wrong, until he draws a box and says the sheep is inside, which pleases the boy completely. Over the following days the narrator learns the little prince's story. He comes from a house-sized planet, which the narrator identifies as asteroid B-612, first seen by a Turkish astronomer who was believed only when he lectured in European dress. There the prince rakes out his volcanoes, pulls up baobab seedlings before their roots split the planet, and once watched the sunset forty-four times in a day because he was sad. A proud, coughing rose sprouts on his planet; he tends her, puts her under a glass globe and a screen, but is hurt by her vanity and her small lies, and he leaves on a flight of migrating birds. Their parting shows that she loved him all along. On six nearby asteroids he meets a king who rules everything and commands only what is reasonable, a conceited man who wants only admiration, a tippler who drinks to forget his shame at drinking, a businessman counting the stars he believes he owns, a lamplighter whose tiny world now turns once a minute, and a geographer who has never explored his own planet and sends the prince to Earth. In the African desert the prince meets a snake that offers to send him home whenever he wishes, a three-petalled flower, an echo on a mountain, and a garden of five thousand roses just like his own, which makes him weep. Then a fox asks to be tamed, teaches him that taming makes one creature unique to another, and tells him a secret about seeing with the heart before they say goodbye. He also meets a railway switchman and a merchant selling pills that quench thirst. On the eighth day, with the water gone, the pilot and the prince walk until they find a well. A year after his arrival, the prince lets the snake bite him; he falls gently in the sand, and at daybreak his body is gone. Six years later the narrator writes, asking readers to tell him if they meet the boy. Written and illustrated in the United States in 1942, the book was published in New York by Reynal & Hitchcock in April 1943, in French and in Katherine Woods's English translation; Gallimard first issued it in France in 1945.

Top Lessons

• Taming and responsibility

  The fox teaches that friendship is made by patient time spent together, coming at the same hour and sitting a little closer each day. Once tamed, a friend becomes unlike any other in the world, and the prince learns that his rose is unique because of the care he gave her, not because no other roses exist.

• Seeing what matters

  Grown-ups in the book see a hat where there is a snake swallowing an elephant and trust an astronomer only when he wears a suit. The prince keeps asking what things are for. The book asks readers to look past numbers and appearances to what is essential.

• The foolish grown-ups

  Each asteroid holds one adult shut up in a single concern: power, praise, drink, money, duty or learning without seeing. Their small planets are pictures of small lives. The lamplighter alone earns the prince's respect because he serves something beyond himself.

• Love that asks for patience

  The prince runs away from his rose because her words hurt him, and only later understands that he should have judged her by her deeds and her fragrance. The book shows how hard it is to love someone who is proud and fragile, and how leaving can teach what staying would have.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Medicine is not a subject of the book, but two episodes reach a clinical reader. The tippler's planet (Chapter XII) is a famous one-page picture of a self-perpetuating cycle: he drinks to forget that he is ashamed, and he is ashamed of drinking. It is a fable, not a case history, but it is often cited in talk about the shame cycle in alcohol use. The frame story draws on Saint-Exupéry's own 1935 desert crash and his days of thirst; the pilot's dwindling water and the walk to the well, and the pill merchant whose tablets save fifty-three minutes a week of drinking, play on thirst and its remedies. The ending treats the prince's death by snakebite gently, as a return home, and the narrator's continuing grief six years later frames the whole book.

• Chapter XII

  The tippler explains that he drinks to forget his shame, and that he is ashamed of drinking.

• Chapters XXIII-XXV

  The merchant's thirst-quenching pills; the pilot's water runs out and he and the prince walk to the well.

• Chapters XXVI-XXVII

  The snake's bite, the prince's quiet fall, and the narrator's grief in the years afterward.