Paris in July - Le Petit Prince encore

Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince) pictured on a French stamp, circa 1998.

© catwalker/Shutterstock.com

Antoine Saint-Exupery is probably not as well known as his novella 'Le Petit Prince'. So after the stage production I took my sister to see (post), she was distraught not knowing what happened to the little prince. I reassured her that the little prince was a fable that reflected the authors experience - and after the author, a pilot who crash landed in the dessert, was saved - he was returned to his love and his passion for flying. But.... what I told my sister was based loosely on what I had heard before. I decided to go and look, to see what actually happened to Saint-Exupery.  

So, a reminder.... 

The Novella: 

• a fable and modern classic by French aviator and writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry that was published with his own illustrations in French as Le Petit Prince in 1943
• it's a simple story of a child who travels the universe, visiting planets, in the pursuit of wisdom and finding is place and meaning in life. 
• its narrated by a pilot who has landed in the desert, and this where he meets the boy - the little prince
•  the narrator and the little prince spend 8 days in the desert. After find water, the little prince plans to return to his planet. He tells the narrator that when he looks to the stars he will know the little prince is home. 

What about the Author:  (I've done a little online research) 

• Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was born in Lyons on June 29, 1900
• He flew for the first time at the age of twelve, at the Ambérieu airfield, and it was then that he became determined to be a pilot.
• becoming an accomplished aviator, flying for many years as a commercial pilot, pioneering airmail routes throughout Europe, Africa and South America. 
• When war broke out in 1939, he joined the French Air Force and flew reconnaissance missions until France’s coercive armistice with Germany in 1940. reference  
• Saint-Ex had an undeniable passion for flying, but he also had a reputation as an undisciplined pilot who read books while flying and had little patience for aircraft complexities.
• Antoine met and married the spirited and twice-widowed Salvadoran writer and artist Consuelo Suncin. Their relationship was tempestuous and they left each other and reconnected many times, but they remained married and shortly before his death he said his only regret in dying would be to make Consuelo cry. 
• Consuelo became the inspiration for the character of the Rose in The Little Prince. Consuelo is often considered Antoine’s muse.
• Early in 1923 he crashed his airplane and suffered a skull fracture. Undeterred, he began a career as a mail pilot, flying all over western Europe and North Africa. 
• His love for the desert and the people who lived there led Saint-Exupéry to become director of an airfield in the western Sahara.
• His greatest adventure, though, came in 1935 when he attempted a flight from Paris to Saigon  in bid to beat the airspeed record for that distance. His aircraft, crashed in the Sahara after 20 hours of flight. ..... After four days they were nearly dead, until a desert tribesman rescued them. reference  
• When World War II erupted, he became a military reconnaissance pilot until the German occupation forced him to flee France. Relocating to New York City, he lobbied the U.S. government to intervene in the conflict. Reference.
•  in 1943 Saint-Exupéry returned to France and rejoined his squadron, insisting on flying despite his age and infirmities. https://www.biography.com/writer/antoine-de-saint-exupery
• At the age of 43, On July 31, 1944, in preparation for the impending Operation Dragoon, the Allied invasion of southern France, Saint-Exupéry took off from an airfield on the island of Corsica to take reconnaissance photographs in the area of Grenoble, France. He never returned. Eight days later Saint-Exupéry was officially declared missing in action, presumed shot down by the enemy. Exactly what happened remains a mystery.
• Saint-Exupéry’s mysterious disappearance made international news and was the cause of much speculation until 2000, when a scuba diver exploring the Mediterranean Sea near Marseille discovered the wreckage of a plane that was later raised and identified as Saint-Exupéry’s.
• Just as the Little Prince adored his rose, the world adored Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. The many years and significant effort put into unlocking the truth about his disappearance is testament to that. No matter what happened that day, his legacy will always be one of honor and inspiration.

Concluding Quotes

Doesn't this says alot about a man with his own skeletons and reflections.........

What if, when he was ensconced in Silvia Hamilton-Reinhardt’s living room to write and draw, he “chuckled with pleasure” because he had finally found himself again, because he was finally overcoming his exile—his self-exile—because he was finally reunited with his “beginnings,” his childhood? “And so, I seem to have come to the end of a long pilgrimage. I have discovered nothing, but as though waking from sleep, I simply see again what I was no longer looking at,” he wrote in Flight to Arras. And what if the “teachings” of The Little Prince were to be found here: in this reunion, this rediscovery of a childhood that everyone vaguely yearns for, to put their scattered days back together again and experience their life’s meaning, to become who they truly are?:  (Ref )

This is an insightful quote into what a legacy he left his family...........

Hoping to keep the man’s status as a revered war hero of almost mythical proportions, the surviving Saint-Exupéry family opposed efforts to investigate the source of a landing gear found by scuba diver Luc Vanrell in May 2000. Major pieces of Saint-Exupéry’s downed aircraft, a P-38, was found and brought to the ocean’s surface in 2003. A serial number confirmed this craft belonged to Antoine Saint-Exupéry, though the lack of bullet holes and combat damage keep the aviator author’s true fate hidden behind a shroud of secrecy. (ref)

What ever you think about this Larrikin,
he is legacy is what ever you find in Le Petit Prince