The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry — A Personal Reading
A few years after Wind, Sand and Stars, Saint-Exupéry wrote The Little Prince. At the end of the first book, the keys to the second are already present. What follows is therefore the natural continuation of my reflection on Wind, Sand and Stars. If you read this book as a child, or even if you have never opened it, I invite you to discover it here from a slightly different angle: that of an adult who finds in it sources of reflection that one does not necessarily have at twenty.
The two books form, in my view, a diptych: the first is the work of a man who seeks his truth in action and in the external world; the second is that of the same man who understood, or sensed, that this truth might lie elsewhere.
As with Wind, Sand and Stars, these are personal reflections that engage only myself, and which I offer as food for thought.
A Necessary Division
The Little Prince is the extremely sensitive part of Saint-Exupéry that he could not allow to live in the adult world, and which he kept safe inside a book.
In Wind, Sand and Stars, he speaks in the first person: it is the voice of the pilot, guarded and restrained, observing the world with gravity and reserve. But Saint-Exupéry was clearly a man of extreme sensitivity, almost childlike in the noblest sense of the word. By creating the Little Prince, he externalises this part of himself to allow it to express itself freely. Part of him remains, despite himself, the clumsy aviator who cannot even draw a sheep. The other part can finally say what he could not have said directly.
In my view, this division goes beyond literary device. It was, for Saint-Exupéry, a psychological necessity.
The Same Book, Two Languages
Both books carry the same philosophical quest: the mysterious world, the fragility of man (I use here the term employed by the author), meaning, the strangeness of adults, the responsibility towards what one loves. But the languages are radically different.
In Wind, Sand and Stars, the meditation on what is essential passes through harsh experience: the cold, the thirst, the suffering of Guillaumet and the death of Mermoz, the solitude of the desert. It is a truth wrested from physical suffering and virile camaraderie. In The Little Prince, the same truth passes through myth, symbol, apparent lightness. As though the fable allowed one to go further, without appearing to suffer.
The narrator of The Little Prince is revealing: it is not the Little Prince himself, but the aviator stranded in the desert. The adult aviator who still cannot draw a sheep. It is Saint-Exupéry who receives the wisdom of the child he once was, or whom he did not know how to remain. There is a painful nostalgia in this construction.
Mozart Is Condemned: the Keys to the Second Book in the First
At the end of Wind, Sand and Stars, Saint-Exupéry observes a child asleep on a train and writes: “Here is a musician’s face, here is Mozart as a child, here is a beautiful promise of life. The little princes of legend were no different from him… But there is no gardener for men. Mozart as a child will be stamped like the others by the great machine. Mozart is condemned.”
Saint-Exupéry sees himself as the one standing between the great machine of society that crushes individuals into conformity, and the little princes. And the Little Prince is the chosen one whom he saves from men, who can keep within him the truth that the adult world does not know how to receive. I believe this is the spirit in which it was written, and it is often in this spirit that it continues to be given to children: the ever-repeated hope that the next generation will live better. This will be possible only if we give them the means to do so: a better education, a more nurturing environment in which to grow.
To Tame: the Word He Did Not Know How to Live
The central concept of The Little Prince is precisely to tame. The fox explains what this means: to create bonds, to accept vulnerability, to be transformed by the other.
Yet Saint-Exupéry never truly succeeded in taming his own inner life. Not in his marriage with Consuelo, chaotic and painful. Not in his relationship with the world. He knew what needed to be done, he could write it with magnificence, but he could not live it. This is perhaps the true tragedy: an extraordinary lucidity about what matters, and an inability to experience it in a lasting way. He could only situate himself in the world through tension and action, very rarely through stillness and the acceptance of what is.
This gap between what one senses and the capacity to live it is, moreover, one of the central themes of coaching work.
The Disappearance of the Little Prince: a Confession
At the end of the book, the Little Prince disappears. Saint-Exupéry cannot hold him back. It is not the serpent that kills him: it is the impossibility of remaining in our world. The narrator-aviator must let him go, powerless to keep him.
One might read in this a sombre confession: this sensitivity, Saint-Exupéry never truly managed to tame. It was perhaps too vivid, too exposed. He could not live fully with it. He may thus have kept his most fragile part safe inside a book, in the character of the Little Prince, as though entrusting to him what he could not carry alone.
Two years after the publication of The Little Prince, he climbed into his P-38 and never returned.
The Serpent: a Rewritten Myth
In Genesis, the serpent is the tempter who led Eve and then Adam to taste the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This act brings them into the adult world, into consciousness and suffering. It is an irreversible loss of innocence, an entry into the world of complexity, mortality and responsibility.
In The Little Prince, the serpent plays the exactly opposite role: it brings the Little Prince back out of the adult world, towards his planet, towards his rose. It is the ferryman in the other direction, towards the origin, towards lost purity. Saint-Exupéry rewrites the myth by reversing the direction of the journey.
This reversal suggests another reading of original sin. In Genesis, the fault is to want to know. In Saint-Exupéry, the existential fault is the reverse: it is to feel too deeply in a world not made for that. Sensitivity becomes a vulnerability, a misfit in the world of the grown-ups who count, possess and command.
This image of the serpent as ferryman struck me on re-reading. As a coach, I find myself ironically in a position that resembles both narratives: I invite my clients to explore and become aware, to accept and tame their world, and at the same time I allow them to rise towards what is most true and most light within them. I leave you with this as food for thought.
Sensitivity as a Path Towards Meaning
Reason analyses, divides, classifies. It produces knowledge about things: their relationships, their functions, their uses. But it has its limits. A great part of what we perceive of the world passes through processes to which we have no conscious access: our apprehension of space, time, risk, and others. We do not choose these filters. They precede us.
And beyond these invisible mechanisms, our deeper motivations and the meaning we give to things often escape reason as well. We commit, we love, we renounce for reasons we cannot always articulate. We rationalise afterwards, believing we have maintained full control. Contemporary psychology and neuroscience confirm this: a large part of our decisions is produced by processes that consciousness does not observe.
Pascal sensed this long before them: the heart has its reasons that reason does not know. This is not an invitation to the irrational. It is the recognition that there exists another mode of access to reality, more immediate, more embodied. This is also what the fox says: what is essential is invisible to the eye.
I find myself in agreement with Saint-Exupéry in this well-known phrase. And it is precisely this territory that coaching helps to explore: it creates the conditions for a person to access what lies deep within them, but which they cannot yet put into words.
What This Reading Brings Me
I have always carried within me a great sensitivity. With the years, though it took many of them, I developed the capacity to use it constructively without being swept away by it, to keep it whole whilst remaining grounded.
Many seek to build a shell, to harden themselves, to feel less strongly, convinced that sensitivity is a weakness. In our world, this is understandable. But what I have learnt, and what I seek to offer in my coaching practice, is different: to work with one’s sensitivity, not against it. To tame it, to use the fox’s word.
Saint-Exupéry revealed many truths of life. He wrote them with rare genius. But in my view he did not find how to live them. This is perhaps what coaching, practised with depth and honesty, can offer: the space and the accompaniment to live oneself the path one senses.
