À la rencontre du Petit Prince
Image Credit: Twitter
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince outwardly assumes all the innocence of the archetypal fairytale, with the tale of its child protagonist captivating the mind of adults and children alike across the world. Is Saint-Exupéry’s text however to some extent a victim of its own success? Beneath it, the figure of Saint-Exupéry remains somewhat obscured, whilst the tensions between the text’s seeming simplicity and profound nature remain unresolved. These questions are just some of those explored in a recently opened exhibition entitled ‘À la rencontre du Petit Prince’, open in the Musée des Arts-Décoratifs in Paris until the 26th of June 2022.
Seeking to highlight new ways of understanding and rediscovering the famous novel to its visitors, the exhibition presents a series of watercolors, drawings, photos, poems and letters which follow the creation of its famous character alongside the life and personal experiences of Saint-Exupéry. The original manuscript of the text, normally housed at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, forms part of this tribute as it is presented to the French public for the first time.
The exhibition first explores the role of childhood in Saint-Exupéry’s life, where childhood is not simply a formative period of life, but also a concept to which his later works would attach themselves heavily. Born in Lyon on the 29th June 1900, Saint-Exupéry was encouraged by his mother, a watercolor painter, to pursue the arts as part of his education. Drawing and the arts therefore became crucial in the construction of Saint-Exupéry’s poetic outlook and vision on the world, so much so that the exhibition might appear at an initial glance to take for its subject a renowned artist rather than a writer. It becomes quickly clear that Le Petit Prince does not simply contain a number of illustrations, but that it is a work imagined first and foremost through the act of drawing. Visitors are able to see the text’s more iconic sketches, such as those of the boa constrictor and the sheep, yet this idea is emphasized more heavily through the exhibition’s presentation of several imagined but unpursued characters and their sketches. These images not only map the course of the text’s development, but also blur the boundaries that many might assume to separate childhood from adulthood, an obfuscation which extends onto the textual level.
Aviation is taken as a central theme of the exhibition by the museum, much as it is often an organizing principle of Saint-Exupéry's oeuvres. Throughout his career and during the Second World War, Saint-Exupéry worked as a pilot for various airlines. His personal experiences and fascination with aviation informed many of his earlier texts, with the novel Vol de Nuit for example published in 1931. Concerning Le Petit Prince, much like the novel’s pilot protagonist finds himself stranded in the desert, Saint-Exupéry himself, alongside André Prévot and before being rescued by nearby Bedouins, found himself in a similar position for three days in Libya during the year 1935. It is hard to separate this experience from the basic structure of the text’s plot, whilst the Prince himself is a representative of the poetic figure of the aviator.
The exhibition then seeks to move the book away from its assumed innocence in an attempt to reveal the humanist and philosophical positions of its author. It becomes clear to the exhibition’s visitors that this innocence only masks an underlying complexity and sobriety to the text, written within a context of conflict in New York between 1941 and 1943. This mask allows the text to assume its dual role as a novel for both children and adults, to conceal a profound interior but to display an innocent exterior. This duality accounts not only text’s universal success and enigmatic status, but also for the exhibition’s appeal to those of all ages.
It is through the series of encounters between the Prince and the other characters within the text that the author is able to expound the so-called “morale expuérienne” (Exuperian code of ethics). The ‘renard’ (fox) for example does not live up to its shrewd and cunning stereotypes, but rather reveals the importance of the rose and of friendship to the Prince. « Il est très simple : on ne voit bien qu’avec le cœur. L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux ». Empathy is at the center of the interactions between characters in the novel, where this allows Saint-Exupéry to locate the true value of human relationships within love, friendship, and solidarity. To identify any moral code might at first seem to represent to the reader an abstraction of the text’s childlike simplicity. Yet through the presentation of the text under a more analytical lens, Saint-Exupéry's fundamental message of hope emerges from the exhibition as it ironically works against the fox’s philosophical musing, seeking to make visible the essential to its visitors, largely through the display of sketches and photographs.
‘À la rencontre du Petit Prince’ therefore presents the text to its visitors as a work that sits on and blurs many boundaries, where these tensions and ambiguities might not be initially obvious. Once revealed however, they allow for a new way of reflecting upon and questioning the text’s messages. « Le petit prince avait sur les choses sérieuses des idées très différentes des idées des grandes personnes ». Saint-Exupéry’s plane was shot down in 1944 during the Second World War, and the Prince remains the sole representative of his positive humanist message, encouraging its readers, children and adults alike, to reflect upon what is important in their own lives.