Dissecting The Little Prince

"The day you stop loving me you can leave with my heart in your hands, and it will be blessed."
"And if you ever love another man, you'll have proven yourself faithless - but I don't want you to leave."

Such are the "vows" spoken between Consuelo (first speaker) and Antoine (second speaker) de Sainte-Exupery shortly before their marriage. They were recorded in The Tale of the Rose, a memoir of their complicated relationship, written by Consuelo a few years after her husband's plane disappeared over southern France.

If, as a college professor taught, you can't know a book until you know its author, and you can't know an author without reading more than one of his books (and books about the author), then you can't understand The Little Prince without including the memoir in your reading. I read The Tale alongside the well-beloved fable, and it did illumine the story.

Antoine, author of The Little Prince, acknowledged his wife as being the rose among roses, the one rose in all the universe who "tamed" him and that he yet abandoned time and again. For Antoine, the rose's planet was too small. He found the rose too demanding, too precious for long close contact. He would roam into the garden of 5,000 roses, be amused by them, and then return. This was a pattern of their marriage.

It could be that, like the little prince, he came to believe, "I should have never run away. I ought to have realized the tenderness underlying her silly pretensions. Flowers are so contradictory! But I was too young to know how to love her." Was Exupery exasperated by his wife? Did he mistrust her? Allow "certain inconsequential remarks" to bother him too much? Was he annoyed by her vanity? Had he failed to appreciate her perfume, and how she lit up his life? We only have his testament and her memoir.

He left unacknowledged how often he would uproot the rose, plant her in another garden, and then leave her alone. Consuelo would adapt, settle in, accustom herself to waiting for him and to being lonely. She would find work and make friends. And then he would reappear, light up her world, and say, "It's time to move!" After the move, he would soon announce, "I must be off!" Thus he would separate her from her "support system" and abandon her again.

Today, we'd call this a controlling personality. He is like the fox, who told the prince how he wanted to be tamed. Antoine wanted Consuelo all to himself, in short increments and only on his terms. This constant upheaval and uncertainty about their relationship caused her tremendous strain; her physical and mental health suffered throughout their life "together." It wasn't until what became the last year or so of his life that they actually lived happily for a space of time while he wrote The Little Prince. Then he was off again near the end of WWII, to save France, and his plane was lost.

It's difficult to read about an untamed man like Exupery. How are we to understand or sympathize with him? But Consuelo keeps you rooted. Her reactions to her circumstances are very normal. She, like you, marvels at his audacity, and yet she is not embittered by him. In the last pages of the book she confirms her love for him and relates some humerous stories that help us see his appeal. He was a charming man, delighting anyone in his presence, and leaving a vacuum in his absence. Childlike to the end of his days, his fable was true for him, if not completely true of himself. A person can write beautifully and not live that way.

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Notable quotes from The Little Prince:

"The proof of the little prince's existence is that he was delightful, that he laughed, and that he wanted a sheep. When someone wants a sheep, that proves he exists."

"'It's a question of discipline,' the little prince told me later on. 'When you've finished washing and dressing each morning, you must tend your planet.'"

"'One must command from each what each can perform,' the king went on. 'Authority is based first of all upon reason.'"

"But the vain man did not hear him. Vain men never hear anything but praise."

"The little prince had very different ideas about serious things from those of the grown-ups. 'I own a flower myself,' he continued, 'which I water every day. I own three volcanoes, which I rake out every week. I even rake out the extinct one. You never know. So it's of some use to my volcanoes, and it's useful to my flower, that I own them. But you're not useful to the stars.'"

"'The only things you learn are the things you tame,' said the fox."

"'Anything essential is invisible to the eyes,' the little prince repeated, in order to remember. 'It's the time you spent on your rose that makes your rose so important. . . . You become responsible forever for what you've tamed. You're responsible for your rose.'"

"The stars are beautiful because of a flower you don't see."