The Little Prince reborn

By Tim Martin

In Mark Osborne’s fantastically clever film adaptation of “The Little Prince”, the French aviator and novelist Antoine de Saint-Exupéry lives on in a daringly counterfactual way. According to history, Saint-Exupéry died when his plane went down in 1944, on a reconnaissance mission over occupied French waters. The previous year, before leaving New York for North Africa to rejoin his squadron, he had tossed a paper parcel containing some handwritten drafts and drawings onto the hall table of his friend Silvia Hamilton. “I'd like to give you something splendid,” she remembered him saying, “but this is all I have.”

Those pages, printed as a book the same year, went on to become one of the most popular works of fiction in the world. They told the story of a downed aviator in the desert, desperate for water and on the point of death, who encounters a tiny aristocratic alien wandering in the dunes and settles down to hear his stories about his tiny home planet, the vain and capricious rose he cherishes, and his journey through the cosmos to Earth on a flock of birds. Saint-Exupéry died before he could bank a single royalty cheque, but in the seven decades since then, more than 140m copies of “The Little Prince” have been sold – fewer than “The Hobbit”, but more than any of the Harry Potters, any of the Beatrix Potters, any Agatha Christie mysteries or “The Catcher in the Rye”. Its mournful story has been adapted for television, for the stage, as an opera, as several musicals (one by Lerner and Loewe) and as films in Germany, Russia, France and America. (Orson Welles, fascinated by the book, once got as far as setting up a meeting with Walt Disney to discuss a joint adaptation; the plan collapsed when the great animator stormed out proclaiming that there “wasn't room on this lot for two geniuses”.)