The first night, then, I went to sleep on the sand, a thousand miles from any human habitation. I was more isolated than a shipwrecked sailor on a raft in the middle of the ocean. Thus you can imagine my amazement, at sunrise, when I was awakened by an odd little voice. It said:
That, however, is not my fault. The grown-ups discouraged me in my painter's career when I was six years old, and I never learned to draw anything, except boas from the outside and boas from the inside.
Now I stared at this sudden apparition with my eyes fairly starting out of my head in astonishment. Remember, I had crashed in the desert a thousand miles from any inhabited region. And yet my little man seemed neither to be straying uncertainly among the sands, nor to be fainting from fatigue or hunger or thirst or fear. Nothing about him gave any suggestion of a child lost in the middle of the desert, a thousand miles from any human habitation. When at last I was able to speak, I said to him:
"But--what are you doing here?"
And in answer he repeated, very slowly, as if he were speaking of a matter of great consequence:
But I had never drawn a sheep. So I drew for him one of the two pictures I had drawn so often. It was that of the boa constrictor from the outside. And I was astounded to hear the little fellow greet it with,
"That is exactly the way I wanted it! Do you think that this sheep will have to have a great deal of grass?"
"Why?"
"Because where I live everything is very small . . ."
"There will surely be enough grass for him," I said. "It is a very small sheep that I have given you."
He bent his head over the drawing.
"Not so small that--Look! He has gone to sleep . . ."
And that is how I made the acquaintance of the little prince.
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The Little Prince is a novella written and illustrated by french aristocrat Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900 – 1944). First published in 1943, the book has since been translated into more than 190 languages and has sold more than 80 million copies, placing it among the best selling books ever. It tells the story of a pilot and the young prince he meets, who has fallen to Earth from an asteroid. The Little Prince (Le Petit Prince) is both a plea to those who suffer from the degenerative disease of the imagination known as the adult condition as well as an eloquent examination of love in all its forms.
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