Original subtitles

[mellow instrumental music playing]

[man] Vision is the most important of the human senses.

Right now as you watch these light rays striking the magnified eyes,

similar tiny beams of light are entering your own eyes.

And it's by our eyes that we're able to gain a great part of our knowledge.

[static feedback]

[woman] If we both closed our eyes,

we wouldn't be able to make those snap judgments about each other based on

what we're wearing or what our age is.

[boy singing]

Whether we're able-bodied or not.

[boy] Hello, Reminder Rosie.

[woman] Privileging those invisible riches like

love, and trust, and tolerance,

would be a pretty good place to start.

[man] So, I wanna ask you, how are you doing with your Braille reading and writing?

Good.

So, I think we should start the Braille club.

What do you think?

What shall we call it?

Yeah, we'll have to think of a good title for this club, right?

Um... Cool Kids Club.

"Cool Kids Club"? Okay.

Hey, maybe we can teach Duchess Braille as well.

-Yeah, we can get her. -What do you think?

We can get her out.

And she can sit right beside us.

That'll be great. We'll have Duchess in the Braille club, too.

I've never had a raccoon in the Braille club.

-[laughing] -This is going to be cool, right?

I'm gonna show you a book today

called Le Petit Prince.

And if we open this up,

this is where the Braille is.

We're gonna put both hands on the very top line.

Get all those fingers to touch the Brailles.

I just want you to follow that line across the page.

And what do we do when we get to the end of the line

and want to go to the next one?

Yeah, you bring your left hand across and the right hand follows.

Where is it?

A little bit higher.

[Schiff] I'm not sure you can ever

adequately explain the magic of The Little Prince that distinguish it

among Saint-Exupery's work and among other books.

As with all great classics, it's a book that changes every time you read it.

I know that I came to it, as many of us do,

thinking of it as a children's book.

You read it at some points of your life,

with starry-eyed idealism, and at other times

read it as a metaphor or as an allegory.

It shimmers in and out of sight.

[Thomas De Koninck] It's been translated in over 200 languages.

The numbers are staggering.

Apart from the bible, there's no other example

of a book that has been read by

so many people from different languages, cultures.

There are so many books and so many tales and so many myths.

And this seems to transcend them all.

Why? Why is it...

Why this huge success?

[teacher reading] "Once, when I was six,

I saw a magnificent picture

in a book about the jungle, called True Stories.

It showed a Boa constrictor swallowing a wild beast."

[Christine Nelson] The book begins with an act of violence.

But is also begins with our narrator, the pilot,

inspired, to try to create something himself.

[boy reading] "And after I did some work with a color pencil,

I was able to make my first drawing. My drawing number one.

It looks something like this.

I showed my masterpiece to grown-ups and asked them if the drawing scared them.

But they answered, 'Scared? Why will anyone be scared of a hat?'"

[girl reading] "Since the grown-ups didn't understand what it was,

I made another drawing.

I drew the inside of a Boa constrictor

so that the grown-ups could see it clearly.

You always have to explain things to them."

[Adam Gopnik] The beginning of the book, which is so enormously charming,

it begins with the aviator's exasperated conundrum about the elephant,

the Boa constrictor and the hat.

That's where the story begins 'cause that tell us what the story is about.

It's about the failure of imagination in the grown-up world.

[Mark Osborne] The magic suitcase.

And this book was how I repitched the story.

Gave it a chance for people to see what a stop motion puppet looked like.

I always looked at it as we're not replacing the book,

we're celebrating the book.

We were trying to tap into what was really

powerful in the book

for so many people.

There's even a quote that was a headline for us.

The aviator says, "I do not want my story to be taken lightly."

[airplane whirring]

[man narrating] I lived my life alone,

without anyone that I could really talk to until I had an accident with my plane

on the desert of Sahara.

[explosion]

I was more isolated than a shipwrecked sailor

on a raft in the middle of the ocean.

As you can imagine my amazement at sunrise,

when I was awaken by an odd little voice.

[The Little Prince] If you please,

draw me a sheep.

[Nelson] He's not asking for a drink of water.

He's not asking for money. He's not asking for the nearest train station.

He wants

a work of the imagination.

That is what he's calling for.

And the pilot does his best to comply.

The fourth drawing, he draws a box.

The sheep you asked for is inside.

[Nelson] And the pilot knows what's inside.

And The Little Prince knows what's inside.

Because they share that ability to see what is invisible.

That's perfect.

Exactly the way I wanted it.

It is?

[Dany Laferriere speaking French]

I always saw the aviator

as someone in despair

who arranged the accident in the desert

in search of meditation.

At the moment

flower of his spirit appeared

and that's The Little Prince.

[Guillaume Cote in English] The aviator, little prince,

the way that they interact,

I always thought they were the same person.

This man who is dangerously close to death in the desert...

Draw me a sheep.

And he's having this weird hallucination dream.

How did you... Ah.

[Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt speaking French]

It's a meeting of the adult and the child.

He tries to create

the ideal of man's life,

which means that the child he was

and the man he now is,

hold hands.

The story begins when

the two lost souls find each other.

[Mark Osborne in English] Saint-Exupery sat his nieces and nephew on his knee

and told stories about meeting a little prince in the desert.

And these nieces and nephews in their 90s,

still believe to this day those same stories that they were told.

[Francois D'agay speaking French]

The entire book is built on a vision

of this little prince

who asks questions that are rarely asked

by children that age.

Where is he from?

Where is he going?

[Schiff speaks English] Saint-Exupery traveled immensely and knew

something about the universality of nuttiness.

[laughing] And was able to really translate all of that

into a very simple distilled tale.

And I think, that too is unusual for someone to have seen

so many of the oddities of the world,

and to have realized how constant they were across the board.

You know, I think the reason why a story becomes

universal and timeless,

when something is also personal.

I think it's the story of his own life.

Reading it, I want to know who Saint-Exupery was

because I feel like I know him emotionally.

I just don't know him personally.

[Schiff] He was born in 1900.

And grows up in a chateau outside Lyon.

His father dies young, so he's brought up really by a single mother,

in a family of siblings where he

seems to think himself anyway the favorite child.

And he is a bit of an inventor child.

He's someone who does experiments in the bath tub.

Or attaching the wings to the bicycle.

He writes poetry at a very early age.

And he really romanticizes the house, the family.

He says, "I will always be the child of that house."

So it's a very tight family in which he is clearly a little bit of the eccentric,

and very much tolerated by his equally creative siblings.

Um, but he's marked in some ways by early loss.

[Alain Vircondelet speaking French]

The death of his father was the first step

in a painful and melancholic existence.

A life detached by the death of the father.

One could say that Saint-Exupery's life, symbolically,

is a permanent quest to return to childhood.

[The Aviator] My little man, where do you come from?

What is this?

Where I live, what you speak.

Where do you want to take your sheep?

[The Little Prince laughing] But where do you think he would go?

[The Aviator] Anywhere, straight ahead of him.

[The Little Prince] That doesn't matter.

Where I live everything is so small.

Straight ahead.

Nobody can go very far.

[speaking French]

There is this power within adults,

myself included,

which wants to be done with childhood.

Because we want to be done with ignorance.

Done with uncertainty.

Done with doubt.

[in English] The lovely thing about children

is that they expose themselves

on all levels easily and well.

But we begin to have layers and layers of that,

uh, you know, covering us.

We lose our innocence.

We become self-conscious.

[Mark Osborne] You have to grow up. You can't stop the clock.

But we were all once kids.

And no matter what's happened to you as a grown-up,

you have this ability to tap back into that more innocent, more pure

time in your life.

It's about remembering that and staying connected to that.

[Schiff] Saint-Exupery is sort of child man in many ways.

There's an innocence that trails him around.

Which many of us outgrow and he never did.

And that leads to endless disappointments in his life.

He's always at odds with the practical world.

And many of the people whom he parodies in The Little Prince,

are the people with whom he was at odds over the years

because they expected him to

be an adult and arrive on time and fulfill his obligations

and pay attention to the stupidities of the world,

like, you know, how many stars there were in the sky.

So, as opposed to appreciating the beauty of the stars in the sky.

[The Aviator] I had thus learned a second fact of great importance.

This was that the planet The Little Prince came from

was scarcely any larger than a house.

I have serious reason to believe

that the planet from which The Little Prince came

is the asteroid known as B-612.

[Trinh Xuan Thuan speaking French]

This asteroid has been seen only once by telescope,

in 1909

by a Turkish astronomer.

He made a formal demonstration

of his discovery at an International Astronomical Congress.

But no one had believed him

on account of how he was dressed.

[indistinct chatter]

Grown ups are like that.

Fortunately, for the reputation of Asteroid B-612,

a Turkish dictator ordered his people,

under threat of death,

to wear European clothes.

The astronomer repeated his demonstration

in 1920

wearing a very elegant suit.

And this time everyone believed him.

[all applauding]

[Guillaume Cote speaks English] Some person shows up dressed in a certain way

and nobody takes him seriously,

but then, as soon as they conform and they dress accordingly,

and sound the right way, then suddenly people actually take them seriously.

Western clothes in Saint-Exupery's

experience and in his imagination stand for the leveling, the homogenization

of mankind by one standard, one model.

He's very much a man of the French empire,

at the same time, he is a critic, he is a satirist

of the leveling out that imperialism imposes.

[rustling]

[Eric Dupont speaking French]

There were some terrible seeds

on The Little Prince's planet.

Baobab seeds.

The planet's soil was infested by them.

"Now, if you tend to a baobab too late,

you can never get rid of it again.

It overgrows the whole planet.

Its roots pierce right through.

And if the planet is too small,

and if there are too many baobabs,

they make it burst into pieces."

[girl speaking English] It's smooth.

Touch it.

[Eric Dupont speaking French]

"This little boy already had huge responsibilities

by which the very survival of this planet

depended on him."

[Nelson in English] We tolerate all kinds of acts of

say racist or prejudice or misogyny day after day.

If you don't get to those seeds right away,

those insidious seeds,

they will start to grow and they will

overtake your planet.

And there is no going back.

This drawing is heart-breaking.

It shows The Little Prince seated alone on his planet,

on his little chair watching the sunsets.

And we know that he loved to watch them.

[boy] Does he live here?

[man] For now he's there.

When we get to the end of the day,

and the sun goes down, what would you feel?

Uh, happy.

[man] Come let us go look at a sunset now.

[Guillaume Cote] The Little Prince in describing his planet,

there was a way for him to watch a sunset

44 times in one day,

but just slightly moving his chair.

When I was trying to adapt this as a ballet,

I thought that was such a beautiful image.

We came up with this idea that we would reflect it by having this chair rotate

on one leg.

And then we would have the lighting simulate a sunset

each time that it did a quarter turn.

So, throughout the piece, there are 44 changes of lights.

Time stops, then we all watch the sun set.

And we're reminded of how little we are, because

the day is finished, and you know, no matter what, the sun will always set.

We are inconsequential to that process.

[woman] It's just the end, isn't it?

Of everything.

Excepting if you have hope of course, there is a sunrise to follow.

[Thomas De Koninck] When you contemplate a sunset,

then you are free.

You are free.

Here is the very heart of the problem of flight.

What do you mean?

Look at this screw.

When I pull this string, the screw will fly upwards.

[clangs]

All we have to do is to find a power that will drive it forward.

[Adam Gopnik] There was a huge romance of aviation in France

between 1900 and 1940,

much more than in the United States.

Aviation isn't simply a triumph of material engineering,

but it's a triumph of the romantic imagination.

That's very much part of the background ofThe Little Prince.

[Schiff] The aviation fever

particularly infects Saint-Exupery,

there's no question he falls out of the spell, if this is what he wants to do.

[Francois D'agay speaking French]

Antoine de Saint-Exupery was "baptized" in the air

when he was just a young child.

He wasn't even 10 years old.

There was a small air field nearby.

He asked a pilot to take him up

and the pilot agreed.

I imagine that first flight was magical for him.

[Schiff in English] And there was always something very magical

about those years which are marked by tragedy twice,

not only because of the loss of his father,

but because the brother dies young as well.

There's a very tender relationship between the two boys.

And simply to whom he's closest.

[Francois D'agay speaking French]

The death of his brother, Francois,

he had a hard time accepting it.

He was 17 years old.

His brother was 15 years old.

For him it was an injustice.

[Oliver D'agay in English] His brother giving him his favorite toys

in some kind of transmission.

They still live in your mind,

through these objects,

through our memories, our strong bond.

The Little Prince is also about

how he can manage

the deaths of the people we love.

[Schiff] He was clearly a little bit lost,

searching for the right thing to do and for the right passion.

He sits for his naval exams with no particular enthusiasm,

and he fails them.

He ends up in Beaux-Arts school for architecture,

and that doesn't last terribly long.

So the question in his early twenties becomes, "What do you do?"

There is a petulance in The Little Prince,

which is probably a direct carry over from its author.

And he is relentless in his pursuit of a pilot's license,

and he unleashes that on anyone who stands in his way

in terms of keeping him out of the air.

He is absolutely untiring

in terms of knocking on doors and asking people,

you know, "May I go up in your plane? May I put in some hours."

He would fly with an ex-German pilot who is not even authorized to take up

a civilian at a military air field.

He ends up breaking every rule in order to get what he wants.

[Eric Dupont speaking French]

L'Atecoere in Toulouse

invited him to participate in this

grand adventure called l'Aeropostale.

[Schiff in English] Flying the mail in hand-written letter,

from Paris to Dakar

over a series of stops

over the completely unpopulated parts of the Western Sahara.

And the romance of that,

that sense of it, it enveloped, requiring that much effort

to be able to connect two people.

I mean, that sense of connection was really vital to what he did.

[Eric Dupont speaking French]

Aeropostale is a way to

rejoin and relink to humanity

which he feels is detached

like him.

[Schiff in English] When he joins the mail service,

he immediately falls into a cocoon of male solidarity.

They rely on each other, they're up against terrific odds.

The planes that fly during these years are

really basic contraptions.

They go 80 miles an hour.

They are practically elastic, so when they crash, its not really a problem,

because so much just bounces and they can be repaired

with a block of wood and glue and a hammer.

They're crashing left and right and saving each other's lives.

Every time they go off, there is a chance they are not going to return.

[engine starts]

[Oliver D'agay] Piloting plane at this time was a war.

These guys were so strong, my God.

Escaping death.

We cannot understand

the quality of these people.

They're, they're, they're amazing guys.

Something very... He was a pilot of instinct.

He was a great pilot.

What is a great pilot?

A great pilot is a pilot alive.

[The Little Prince] A sheep, if he eats these little bushes,

does he eat flowers, too?

[The Aviator] A sheep eats anything it finds in his reach.

[The Little Prince] Even flowers that have thorns?

[The Aviator] The flower that you love is not in danger.

I will draw you a muzzle for your sheep.

I will draw you a railing to put around your flower.

It is such a secret place, the land of tears.

[Rupi Kaur] The Little Prince is wondering,

if the sheep comes along and takes his rose,

and I can't protect her, what's gonna become of me?

[Mark Osborne] The rose represents a very complicated relationship,

and it was actually probably the most challenging aspect of the book.

The idea that relationships take work and commitment.

[The Rose sighs]

I'm scarcely awake.

I beg that you will excuse me.

My petals are still all disarranged.

[The Little Prince] Oh, how beautiful you are!

[The Rose] Am I not?

[The Aviator] And The Little Prince, completely abashed,

went to look for a sprinkling can of fresh water.

So, he tended the flower.

[teacher reading] "'At night, I want you to put me under a glass globe.

It's very cold where you live.'

She had come in the form of a seed.

She couldn't have known anything of the other world.

Embarrassed over having let herself

be caught on the verge of such a naive untruth,

she coughed two or three times in order to disguise this fact.

[clears throat]

So The Little Prince, in spite of all the good-will

that was inseparable from his love,

had soon come to doubt her."

[Schiff] There's a really interesting precursor to The Little Prince.

Saint-Exupery visits one of these forts

at which there is a French colonial administrator,

and he's living there with his wife

in the absolute middle of nowhere.

The wife basically nurtures a single solitary plant.

And you can see the beginnings of The Little Prince's rose.

[airplane whirring]

[speaking foreign language]

[Schiff] Saint-Exupery was posted to the Western Sahara, Cape Juby.

It's only there so that the planes can stop and refuel on their way

along the coast of Africa to Dakar.

[speaking French]

Tarfaya, Cape Juby, was the place where

they would exchange planes.

The mail that comes from the north

and the mail that comes from the south

they meet here in Tarfaya

then each plane returns where they came from.

[Schiff in English] There's something about the open sky,

the open view, the open sand

that utterly seduces Saint-Exupery.

It's the first place he feels at home.

As an ambassador of the colonial power,

he actually, kind of takes it upon himself to look like and to speak with

the people of what is today Morocco.

[Shaibata speaking French]

He didn't just stay in the fort with the Spaniards.

He went out to visit the locals.

Saint-Exupery had a gift,

a sort of key that could open

people's hearts.

[Shaibata in English] Tarfaya is the only city that still beats the same rhythm

of the Aeropostale and Saint-Exupery, because nothing has changed.

This is the airstrip of Tarfaya.

The little wall there actually is the house of Saint-Exupery

where he lived for 18 months.

And the hangars are still there.

[Schiff] The mail service.

It's like a military squadron in many ways.

And among that group of people,

two of the other great pioneering French aviators,

Jean Mermoz and Henri Guillaumet

become very close friends of Saint-Exupery.

Several times they will rescue and relay each other.

But Guillaumet in particular will crash in the Andes.

[Alain Vircondelet speaking French]

The moment when Guillaumet disappears from radar

and we assume that he's gone

is a moment that will play a huge part

in Antoine's life.

It's a huge friendship. Even love.

And so he goes out to find him.

Even taking personal risks to find him.

In this vast unreadable void,

he knows it is almost impossible.

But... he goes away.

[Schiff in English] For days and days on end

Guillaumet tromps through the snow Andes.

And says things like, "It's just the next step that matters."

He's finally saved by a woman who lives in the foothills of the Andes.

An extraordinary survival tale

that Saint-Exupery will make famous because he will write about it

in the Wind, Sand and Stars.

[airplane whirring]

When he's posted to South America to fly the mail routes,

he meets a very fetching,

very charismatic 28-year-old widow, Consuelo.

Whom he marries very quickly, takes back to France, introduces to his family.

And Consuelo was the perfect match for him in the sense that she too lives

a couple of feet above reality.

She's a tremendous spinner of tales.

She's a highly imaginative creature.

But on the other hand,

they have a very fraught relationship.

Living together, living apart.

Each of them has other romantic attachments and that gets messy at times.

Friends are called in to help the two of them communicate better.

And yet they can't live without each other.

[speaking French]

First time I met her

was when Saint-Exupery brought her here.

I was six years old with my sisters.

Consuelo spoke kindly to each of us,

as one does with young children.

She was a dreamer.

Part of the background of the book famously is about

saving Exupery's own very tormented and complicated marriage.

And which is represented

in effect in the allegory of The Prince and the Rose.

When Saint-Exupery was lost in the desert,

Consuelo took up a table at the Brasserie Elite in Paris

and, sort of, dramatized her grief in a very Rose-like way.

And that urge toward self-dramatization

was inseparable from whatever grief she was feeling.

What character trait would you use to describe the flower?

She was trying so hard to, like, impress people.

And she wasn't really telling the truth,

and you could always catch her when she was telling a lie

because she would cough.

[teacher] How does The Little Price feel about the flower?

-He loves her. -He loves her?

Why?

Because she's different, and she's not like rest of, all the other flowers.

[Kaur] I have a very complicated relationship with the Rose.

She's vain, all she wants to do is talk about herself.

I wouldn't want to spend time with somebody like that.

She seems to be

the only female character throughout the entire book,

and she's given these qualities that I think

women these days were working to fight.

[Guillaume Cote] I don't think it's a generalized way

of seeing women for Saint-Exupery.

It was much more one specific woman in his life.

"I believe that for his escape,

he took advantage of a migration of a flock of wild birds.

On the morning of his departure, he put his planet in perfect order.

He possessed two active volcanoes.

And they were very convenient for heating his breakfast in the morning.

He also had one volcano that was extinct.

But as he said, 'One never knows.'

So, he cleaned out the extinct volcano, too.

The Little Prince also pulled up,

with a certain sense of dejection, the last little shoots of the baobabs.

He believed that he would never want to return.

But on this last morning,

all these familiar tasks seemed very precious to him.

And when he watered the flower for the last time,

he prepared to place her under the shelter of her glass globe,

he realized that he was very close to tears.

'Goodbye,'

he said to the flower."

[Kaur] I was a little bit annoyed at the Prince.

Nobody is perfect

and when we choose to love we can't expect them to be

exactly how we want them to be when we want them to be.

If you love something, let it go, and if it comes back, then you'll know.

I want to be there with you fully and be present.

But,

can I do that and then will you embrace me,

or are you going to just, sort of, run away like The Prince runs away?

[Nelson] When The Little Prince takes off on his

intergalactic journey,

he makes six stops before arriving on Earth.

Every solitary human on each one of these planets

has a characteristic that is

preventing him from forming meaningful bonds with other people.

[Adam Gopnik] They're comic villains, they're not really evil.

They're just deluded, they're fools of a kind.

But those are the people who we are meant to laugh at.

And to mistrust.

And what it exposes, when you think about it,

are all the human vanities to which

everyone one of us on the planet, no matter where we live,

what color our skin, what language we speak,

what our religion, all of the vanities to which we are prone.

[The Aviator] The Little Prince found himself in the neighborhood

of the Asteroids 325, 326, 327,

328, 329, and 330.

He began therefore by visiting them in order to add to his knowledge.

[Schmitt speaking French]

Saint-Exupery spends his time denouncing the jobs

that have devoured individuals.

The king acting like a king,

the vain man being vain.

People believe they are consistent,

but in fact they are inconsistent.

Because they have forgotten their humanity.

[in English] Your Majesty, it's such a small planet. Why do you need borders?

Well...

♪ Why do borderlines exist? ♪

♪ Well, first and foremost on the list ♪

♪ If all the borders were destroyed ♪

♪ Tomorrow I'd be unemployed ♪

♪ And what would statesman do for fun ♪

♪ If all at once the world was one ♪

[Shaibata] There's no meaning for a king

or a president or a prime minister

to sit on a big chair,

decorated by gold

if you're not loved by your people.

[Nelson] The way Saint-Exupery draws these planets,

really emphasizes the solitude.

You know, he makes a pretty small orb for the planet,

and then, the human on top is enormous.

[Guillaume Cote] The Little Prince never once

holds anything against anyone.

He is just there to observe.

[The Conceited Man] Do you really admire me so very much?

[The Little Prince] What does that mean, "admire'?

[The Conceited Man] To admire means that you regard me

as the handsomest, the best dressed, the richest

and the most intelligent man on this planet.

[The Little Prince] But you are the only man on your planet.

[The King] Do me this kindness,

admire me just the same.

What makes the grown-ups he encounters along the way

foolish is they're monomaniacal.

They only can see the world through one prism, through one obsession.

The drunkard is the one who sort of comes closest

to actually having some insight into the world.

Although he just gets drunk over and over again.

[Oliver D'agay] "'Why are you drinking?' demanded The Little Prince?

'So that I many forget,' replied The Tippler.

'Forget what?'

'Forget that I'm ashamed,' The Tippler confessed.

'Ashamed of what?' insisted The Little Prince."

[Nelson] I think the drinker's tragedy is not the drinking, but the shame.

If you're constantly ashamed of

your own illness,

that's gonna get in the way of allowing yourself to be vulnerable enough

to reach out to another person.

[The Little Prince] You own the stars?

[The Businessman] Yes.

[The Little Prince] And what good does it do you to own the stars?

It does me the good of making me rich.

And what good does it do you to be rich?

Because...

I don't now.

[The Little Prince] How is it possible for one to own the stars?

[The Businessman] If you get an idea before anyone else, it's yours.

So...

I got the idea of owning the stars.

You're with The Businessman and his is personal choice

to be so obsessed with numbers.

[Thomas De Koninck] 1% is richer than 99%.

It has to be shared.

We live in a universe today where that lesson is not heard by

very many of these multi-billionaires that are governing the planet.

[speaking French]

It's only once we multiply all these

ridiculous behaviors

that we them ask ourselves

"What world do we live in?"

[Thomas De Koninck reading]

"'It's a terrible job I have.

It used to be reasonable enough.

I put the lamp out mornings and lit it after dark.

I had the rest of the day to rest.

And the night to sleep.

Now that the planet

revolves once per minute,

I don't have an instant's rest.

I light and extinguish once per minute.'

'That's funny! Your days here are one minute long.'

"It's not funny at all," The Lamplighter said.

'You and I have already been talking

for a month.'"

[Kaur in English] I think, most people can relate to The Lamplighter.

We live in this very capitalistic society.

That's what The Lamplighter represented for me.

Somebody who really has no idea why they're on this routine,

why they're following these instructions,

not challenging the system.

[Guillaume Cote] The reason why The Little Prince can relate

to what The Lamplighter's doing is that for the first time he meets somebody

who's actually serving a purpose beyond himself.

He is dedicated to something that is larger than him.

[Trinh Xuan Thuan speaking French]

The theme of impermanence in the universe,

contrary to The Geographer,

who speaks of things as eternal

but eternity doesn't exist.

Everything changes, evolves, moves.

[The Aviator] The sixth planet was ten times larger than the last one.

It was inhabited by an old gentleman who wrote for luminous books.

[The Geographer] I am a Geographer.

[The Little Prince] What is a Geographer?

[The Geographer] A Geographer is a scholar,

who knows the location of all the seas, rivers, towns, mountains, and deserts.

The Geographer puts purpose on certain things but not on other things.

If it's a river, and then I can write it down.

If its a rose, it'll die.

[The Little Prince] The flower is the most beautiful thing on my planet.

[The Geographer] We do not recall them because they are

ephemeral.

[The Little Prince] What does that mean, "ephemeral"?

[The Geographer] It means, which is in danger of speedy disappearance.

That's part of the human nature.

To try to posses things and especially to keep it for

as long as we can.

But there are things you know that we will lose them.

One learns about the lack of permanence.

We have to learn. It helps us.

If we learn when we are very young, that nothing is lasting,

and sadly, not even love.

[Shaibata] "The seventh planet was Earth.

The Earth is not just an ordinary planet.

One can count 111 kings,

not forgetting to be sure, the negro kings among them.

Seven thousand geographers,

nine hundred thousand businessmen,

seven million, five hundred thousand tipplers,

three hundred and eleven million conceited men,

that is to say about two billion grown-ups."

[Oliver D'agay] What is our quest?

What are we searching for?

Freedom?

Spirituality?

We need to search.

The most important is not having an answer.

The most important is to search.

In a spirit of searching, you're open.

[The Aviator] When The Little Prince arrived on the Earth,

he was very much surprised not to see any people.

He was beginning to be afraid he had come to the wrong planet.

It's not by chance that the first animal

met by The Little Prince on Earth is a snake.

The Snake, when you see it, you think

it's really peaceful. You think it won't hurt you.

The Snake represents the double face that we can see from some people.

[Guillaume Cote] The first meeting with The Snake

is much more mysterious and the danger.

There's a little bit of idea that The Prince doesn't want to be there.

[mysterious music playing]

[The Aviator] The coil of gold, the color of moonlight

flashed across the sand.

[The Little Prince] Good evening, Mr. Snake.

[The Snake hissing] Good evening.

[The Little Prince] What planet is this on which I have come down?

[The Snake] This is the Earth.

This is Africa.

[The Little Prince] It is a little lonely in the desert.

[The Snake] It is also lonely among men.

[The Little Prince] You are a funny animal.

You are no thicker than a finger.

[The Snake] But I am more powerful than the finger of a king.

I can help you someday,

if you grow too home-sick for your own planet.

[Christine De Koninck] The Little Prince senses some evil.

Whether it's a physical characteristic,

or something that he intuitively feels.

There is certainly some fear when they first meet.

And yet, a fascination.

[Thomas De Koninck] The Snake and The Little Prince.

He appears as an instrument of death.

You have to have some figure representing the darker side of human experience.

[Eric Dupont speaking French]

Saint-Exupery presents a world that is inconceivable.

We'll call it magic realism.

In French literature,

magical realism was not popular.

The real avant-garde was situated in

the interest for material things.

[woman vocalizing]

Imagine that nobody could grasp the idea that

this childish representation of the world,

was capable of eliciting deep thought and reflection.

[Nelson in English] We only see The Little Prince

from the back three times in the book.

And each time, it's in a moment of

profound loneliness.

And this is one of them.

The Little Prince is at the end of a long journey

and he still hasn't found what he is looking for.

He's on the edge of a jagged cliff,

perched on the top of the highest mountain that he can find on Earth

looking for human contact.

[The Little Prince] Good morning.

[echoing] Good morning...

Who are you?

[echoing] Who are you?

Be my friends.

I'm all alone.

[echoing] I'm all alone. All alone.

All alone.

On my planet, I have a flower.

She always was the first to speak.

[Nelson] That echo, is just...

A sound of the deepest pain...

that one can feel.

The pain of complete isolation.

[Alain Vircondelet speaking French]

"It was a blossoming rose garden.

'Good morning,' said the roses.

The Little Prince gazed at them.

All of them looked like his flower.

'Who are you?' he asked astounded.

'We're roses,' the roses said.

His flower had told him she was the only one of her kind

in the universe.

I thought I was rich because my flower was unique,

and all I own is an ordinary rose.

And he lay down in the grass and cried."

[Schmitt speaking French]

The Little Prince sees a garden of roses.

They are all beautiful.

And all the same.

And he realizes that his rose,

that he found so unique,

was not unique.

[Kaur in English] He had already picked his rose.

He's caring for the rose, he's in love with the rose.

Then you just don't want to leave the rose even though he does.

But then he arrives at this place

and he sees all these other beautiful options out there.

Have I made the right decision?

Is this really the one?

[Schiff] I find it immensely charming that this pioneer of aviation,

the author of the great classics of flight was actually a very distracted flyer

There are numerous stories from various mechanics with whom he flew

that they would always find balled up pieces of paper in the cockpit.

There is one famous story where he refused to land,

'cause he had to finish the novel he was reading.

Distraction in the cockpit is a rather dangerous combination.

He will attempt to fly essentially from North to South America in a straight line.

From New York City to Patagonia, but he'll crash in Guatemala.

And that crash was purely pilot error in that

there was a little mathematical mistake

made between translating imperial and American gallons.

And that's a crash which takes a terrific toll on him physically.

[Saint-Exupery speaking French]

The accident was due to several converging causes.

On that day, the wind was forcing us to

take off in an uphill direction.

Unfortunately, the landing strip in Guatemala

is situated at an altitude of 1500 meters,

which significantly reduces a plane's importance.

At the end of my run,

I was going about 140 km per hour,

and I hadn't yet left the ground.

With no other choice,

I lifted the plane,

to get over the obstacles in our way.

I managed to get it off the ground,

but no longer than a second.

I crashed on the other side of the landing strip.

From that moment on, I don't know what happened.

My next memories start about a week after that.

[indistinct chatter over radio]

[Francois D'agay speaking French]

In 1939, I was 14 years old when war was declared.

I remember that day.

England and France declared war on Germany

at 5:00.

[Adam Gopnik in English] At the time of the most brutal, the most murderous,

the most unimaginably cruel conflict

ever to have was swept across this sad planet.

[Nelson] When I learned a little bit

about Saint-Exupery's own experience in the war,

I started to feel the pain in the book.

And I was struck with

how extraordinary it was that Saint-Exupery was able to

convey a sense of

pain and hope

in one work of art.

[Schiff] When the Germans invaded France in 1940,

Saint-Exupery's flying nearly suicidal reconnaissance missions.

France falls,

the reconnaissance unit is disbanded.

Everyone in France thought that they had figured out

a material response to the Germans, the Maginot Line, the French Army,

and that material response had failed.

Saint-Exupery decided that the failure, the tragedy,

had been spiritual.

[Schiff] His attempts to say, "This is a universal problem for us,

we're all in this together," he writes an incredibly eloquent plea

called an "Open Letter To Frenchmen Everywhere"

fall on deaf ears.

Because the need at this point for accusation and counter accusation,

is so great, there's a lot of finger pointing.

And he's basically persona non grata among a lot of the French community

for this reluctance to take any kind of political stand.

There is that cry from The Little Prince,

"It's also lonely among men."

[Nicolas Delsalle] When Antoine de Saint-Exupery heard

about his best friend Henri Guillaumet was shot down during the war,

it affected him a lot.

All his friend from the time of Aeropostale passed away.

He felt alone, like he had no more friends on Earth.

Maybe Henri Guillaumet could be related to the story of The Fox

because that strong connection together like the story of The Little Prince.

"It was then that The Fox appeared, 'Good morning,' said The Fox.

'Good morning,' The Little Prince responded politely.

'Come and play with me,' proposed The Little Prince.

'I am so unhappy.'

'I cannot play with you,' The Fox said.

'I'm not tamed.'

What does that mean, 'tamed'?"

[reading in French]

"If you tame me,

we shall need one another.

To me, you will be unique.

And I will be unique to you."

[Oliver D'agay] When Saint-Exupery was in Tarfaya, Cape Juby,

he tamed a fennec, a fox of the desert.

So we think that the fox is coming from the experience in Tarfaya in 1927.

[man reading] "'What must I do to tame you?' asked The Little Prince.

'You must be very patient,' replied The Fox.

'First, you will sit at a little distance from me,

I shall look at you out of the corner of my eye,

and you'll say nothing.

Words are the source of misunderstandings.'"

[Nelson] I always had a little bit of trouble

with that concept of taming because

we don't really wanna tame the people that we love, do we?

We wanna have an equal relationship with them.

Part of the problem there is with the translation of the French word.

What The Fox is asking of The Little Prince,

"Please trust me and teach me to trust you."

[Adam Gopnik] I think he wants us intuitively to make

a distinction between taming and dominating.

That we can have decent relations with creatures outside our experience.

Creatures that are wild and feral.

That do not depend on our

being able to own, rule, and dominate them,

but depend on our being able to be in a kind of

concert with them.

[Thomas De Koninck] Friendship depends for its duration,

for its depth.

You have to share something which will endure.

It does give meaning to the whole of life when you have someone to share it with.

[Dr. Elise Heon] "'Goodbye,' he said.

'Goodbye,' said The Fox.

'Here's my secret.

A very simple secret.

It's only with the heart, that one can see rightly.

What is essential is invisible to the eye.'

'What is essential

is invisible to the eye,' The Little Prince repeated,

so he would be sure to remember."

[Mark Osborne] That was the quote that just

really stayed with me and meant a lot.

I think, no matter what your interpretation of the book is,

or wherever you're coming from or however you're looking at the book,

and whatever age you are, that resonates.

He's got a big weight inside, so he can sit.

[Nelson] The Fox doesn't say, "I've got a message for you.

I've got a lesson for you."

The Fox says, "I've got a secret."

A secret isn't something that comes down from on high.

A secret is something that is shared between friends.

Maybe it's even whispered between friends.

We sort of conspire with everyone in the book

to realize that we have a shared secret.

[Guillaume Cote] Love is not a transaction.

It's a form of self-sacrifice.

It's a form of surrender.

And we have to risk everything in our pursuit,

if we are to deserve it.

[Schiff] "He was a merchant selling sophisticated pills,

and tended to quench one's thirst.

If a single pill was swallowed once a week,

the need to drink disappeared.

'Why are you selling those?' asked The Little Prince.

'Because it saves a lot of time,' said The Merchant.

'Experts have worked it all out.

You save 53 minutes a week.'

'And what does one do with those 53 minutes?'

'Whatever one wishes.'

'If I had 53 minutes to spend,' said The Little Prince,

'I would walk very slowly towards the spring of fresh water.'"

[Schmitt speaking French]

The Little Prince meets a merchant selling pills

that will stop you from ever being thirsty again.

The Little Prince says,

"I would walk towards a fountain,"

It's the time that we activate.

The power to live, the power to do, the power to advance.

Saint-Exupery puts an end to the fatality of passive time

and instead creates a time that belongs to the soul.

[in English] As a man of science, as an aviator,

Saint-Exupery was always entirely enchanted by technology.

On the other hand, he would rail against the technology.

And that sense of our being isolated by these advances

is something he really anticipates.

[man] It won't hurt you.

-Okay. -[sniffles]

-Do you want Mama in with you? -Mmm.

Hmm? Okay, let me call her, okay?

It's okay.

It's okay.

[speaking indistinctly]

I don't like lights.

You like light. I know you like flashlights, right?

No. But I don't like lights.

You like lights.

[whispers] I have a secret, okay?

We're gonna play pretend.

Okay?

Not seeing light

is what defines blindness.

Oh.

Can you open big, big, big--

Last time I did that, it hurt my eye.

No, I don't believe you.

You're trying to get my focus.

Okay, try not to move too much, okay?

-Okay. -You're doing really well.

Okay, good job.

[Dr. Elise Heon] As your vision decreases,

the space occupied from your visual cortex,

decreases.

And other senses increase.

That's really good.

You're doing good.

It's when it happens without them realizing it, they've adapted.

[Thomas De Koninck] And the reverence that we have for technology,

one would not do without them and we're very grateful for them.

But these are all just instruments.

It's a great thing because of the purpose it serves.

And that always depends on the human decisions.

[whooshing]

[Nelson] When France falls in 1940

the decision becomes, as it was for many Frenchmen,

"What to do?"

Are you willing to live in Occupied France?

Or are you gonna go elsewhere?

If you'd ask 1,000 Frenchmen,

where they would like to go, 999 would've said America,

and the 1,000th would've said New York.

Partly because America was France's great hope at that moment.

And if America would only enter the war,

perhaps the Germans could be beaten.

Saint-Exupery obviously needs to leave Europe as quickly as possible,

and will sail for New York.

He arrives at the end of 1940.

It's at a moment of intense loneliness and intense frustration

that no one has come to France's rescue,

that America has not yet entered the war.

This country is occupied by this alien force,

everyone he knows is in danger.

[Eric Dupont speaking French]

The letter we have indicates his level of despair.

And even the total loss of creativity.

He was feeling hopeless and depressed

in the streets of New York.

[Schiff in English] We're not clear

why Consuelo finally will sail to America in 1942.

Whether he sends for her,

or whether she says later, she shamed him into sending for her.

But the circle is squared by bringing her to America,

but finding for her an apartment separate from his on Central Park South.

So they're living in apartments a floor away from each other.

He essentially says to her at one point,

"If you're here, I can't think. And if you're not here, I can't write."

[Alain Vircondelet speaking French]

It was then that his wife, Consuelo,

suggested that they head to Long Island.

To rest and get some sea air.

So they went to Long Island,

and someone offered him this huge home,

Bevin House.

[Brad Fristensky in English] The house was completed during the Civil War, 1862.

The Bevin House, an Asharoken is kind of the jewel in North Port.

Not only because of the structure

but because of the energy and just the environment here.

[Alain Vircondelet speaks French]

His American editors

seeing that he wasn't writing a new book,

and Pilote de Guerre

was a best-seller,

they suggested to Antoine

that he write a children's story.

[Adam Gopnik in English] Pamela Travers is here

in New York City writing the Mary Poppins stories.

J.R.R. Tolkien is in Oxford writing The Hobbit

and The Lord of the Rings.

Just as Saint-Exupery is also writing Le Petit Prince.

What do all those books have in common?

Well, they're all fables about the extreme edge of experience.

The book was rendered here, in the study.

In this serenity and quiet.

[Francois D'agay speaking French]

This little fellow here,

is a fellow that Saint-Exupery drew in various forms.

There are many of them

that we can find throughout the years.

The little fellow is the foreshadowing

of The Little Prince.

He drew with a Stylograph.

The tip upside down.

I can still see him doing it.

[Schiff in English] He'd been drawing little,

mad little figures, little bonhommes,

since his 20s.

All over papers, table cloths,

dry cleaner receipts, this little image reoccurs.

Sometimes they had wings,

sometimes they had eyebrows, sometimes they didn't have eyebrows.

The Little Prince is standing on very craggy hills.

People will ask him where this little man came from.

And his answer to that was always,

"I looked down at a blank sheet of paper one day,

and this little figure looked up at me and said, 'I am The Little Prince.'"

[Nelson] We all think of it as a French story,

or a global story.

But it was a story that was born here in New York.

You can hold it up to the light and even see the watermark.

It says, "FIDELITY onion skin.

Made in USA."

This is the earliest surviving version that we have of the story

written in Saint-Exupery's own hand.

This evokes Saint-Exupery at his desk with his pen and paper.

Coffee stains on some of the pages.

Creating a story that feels now like it belongs to all of us.

[Mark Osborne] When I saw his original manuscript pages,

they were so fragile

and wrinkled and scribbly.

And they just looked like

they could've blown out the window, they could've caught on fire.

One drawing that he had done that he didn't like,

was crumpled up and had been saved out of the garbage.

The fragility, the ephemeral quality of the poetry and the pages...

What if it didn't exist?

[Nelson] This is the work of one creator.

Saint-Exupery wrote and illustrated the book.

And he goes a step further

by claiming that the illustrator of the book is in fact his narrator.

And his narrator isn't such a good artist.

Because he never had a chance to develop that skill as a child.

Because, of course, we grown-ups discouraged him.

[Schiff] With so much more powerful a book,

never really seeing the aviator,

we only see his arm with a hammer.

It makes him more universal to have him off-stage visually.

[Alain Vircondelet speaking French]

There is a drawing that Consuelo made in 1930.

So, 12 years before The Little Prince.

It's a self-portrait.

She had the lioness haircut of that era,

a bit like a little boy.

She had a large shawl

with stars all over it.

It looks just like The Little Prince.

So, you can see that the birth of The Little Prince

comes from many factors

accumulated over time.

[Thomas De Koninck in English] My full family was 11 children.

This was a house really full of life all the time

and no class distinctions of any sort.

I remember jumping through the stairs almost when I was a small boy.

Look at these details.

That's what raises most memories.

Very good memories.

My father had invited Saint-Exupery to give a lecture to the Palais Montcalm.

They had met in Montreal.

And very much agreed on the primacy of the common good.

They really fraternized over that,

and became friends.

He was invited to our home.

I think it was the 4th May, in 1942.

I was eight years old.

My memory of him is right here in the center of the living room,

and the children, we were around him.

He would show us how to make these paper planes.

And he would show us drawings.

This is 1942, the plane was something quite recent.

He was the aviator, our hero.

People used to tell me, "You talk too much, Thomas.

You talk too much. Shut up."

But I kept on talking anyway, always asking questions.

He would listen, he seemed interested.

For once, nobody told me to shut up.

[Oliver D'agay] Saint-Exupery really liked to play with him.

And many say that he has been inspiring Saint-Exupery for The Little Prince.

[Christine De Koninck] I always said

I married a man from another planet.

I'm the only one who really believed about that story.

When you marry a man of another planet, it's not so easy.

But when I heard that story,

it made me understood Thomas much better,

because I was seeing through him Le Petit Prince

and I always loved that story.

So finally, I only saw his qualities instead of seeing...

-The defects. -The others...

[Adam Gopnik] I'm sure Thomas De Koninck

was one of the kids who he was inspired by,

and I think that though he certainly has some of the freshness of spirit

and the fearlessness that bright kids have,

I think we should be cautious in describing

the character of The Little Prince to anything

except Saint-Exupery's own imagination.

[indistinct chatter]

[girl reading Arabic]

"It was now the eight day since my accident in Sahara.

But I have not yet succeeded in repairing my plane

and I have nothing more to drink.

I too would like to walk to a spring of fresh water."

[in English] Let's look for a well.

[The Aviator] And as I walked on,

I found the well at daybreak.

[Kaur] The Little Prince says

that it's not the taste of the water,

but how hard we really had to work to find it and to experience it.

Water represents life.

[singing in Arabic]

[Schmitt speaking French]

The desert is not simply a spiritual place.

It's a philosophical place.

To breathe in the desert is to feel the fragility of your breath.

You simplify yourself.

In order to survive.

[The Aviator] The well that we had come to was not like the wells of the Sahara.

And I thought I must be dreaming.

[The Little Prince] You must keep your promise.

[The Aviator] What promise?

[The Little Prince] You know, a muzzle for my sheep.

I'm responsible for this flower.

[The Aviator] So then, I made a pencil sketch of a muzzle.

I found myself doing something I had not done with any other of the books

that I had read to my children,

and that was too actually pause before the ending.

And say, "I think we've read enough for tonight.

We'll have to continue tomorrow."

Why was he compelled to return

to continue his conversation with that rather satanic snake?

[Adam Gopnik] "'You have good poison?

You're sure that it will not make me suffer too long?

Now go away,' said The Little Prince,

'I wanna get down from the wall.'

I dropped my eyes then to the foot of the wall

and I leaped into the air.

There before me facing The Little Prince was one of those yellow snakes

that take just 30 seconds to bring your life to an end.

At the noise I made, The Snake let himself flow easily across the sand.

'What does this mean?' I demanded.

'Why are you talking with snakes?'

'I'm glad that you've found what was the matter with your engine,' he said.

'Now you can go back home. I, too, am going back home today.'

'Little man,' I said, 'tell me that it is only a bad dream,

this affair of the snake."

But he did not answer my plea.

He said to me instead,

'The thing that is important is the thing that is not seen.'"

[Shaibata] The struggle inside The Pilot

is between the desire to help The Little Prince, to protect him,

and also the necessity for The Little Prince to go back to his rose.

[The Aviator] That night I did not see him set out on his way.

When I succeeded in catching up with him,

he was walking along with a quick and resolute stagger.

There was a flash of yellow close to his ankle.

He remained motionless for an instant.

He did not cry out.

He fell as gently as a tree falls.

There was not even any sound.

[Nelson] What looks like a cosmic suicide

is one of the greatest mysteries of all.

Is he sacrificing his soul to the universe for love?

[speaking French]

The act has all the signs of a suicide.

The ultimate choice.

At the end of alienation. At the end of infantile work.

"At the end of man's exploitation of man."

There lies the ultimate choice, suicide.

[Kaur in English] The snake is gonna send you home,

and isn't that universe home?

That seems like a state of permanence to me versus this world.

[Adam Gopnik] There is a beautiful and poignant ambiguity

which I'm never sure how we're intended to read it,

no matter how times I've read the book.

One way to read it, The Little Prince has simply been killed by the snake bite,

and the looking up and hearing the laughter in the stars

is something that The Aviator projects.

[Schmitt speaking French]

Saint-Exupery tell us

the true kingdom is the consciousness, the person.

And the ties you create with another people.

The Little Prince learns to be the master of his kingdom.

He'll return to his planet to find his flower

because he finally realized that was she who was the most important.

[Schiff in English] Saint-Exupery manages somehow to talk

his way back into the cockpit,

which is really the most miraculous thing he ever does.

He's far too old, he's far too large to be flying a P-38.

He can't even fold himself into it.

He doesn't know how to speak English,

so he can't really communicate with the control tower.

At one point he actually crashes a P-38 off the end of the airfield

'cause he doesn't know how to pump the hydraulic brakes.

So it's really irresponsible for him even to be flying.

[Eric Dupont speaking French]

All his exiled writer friends who joined him in New York

All his exiled writer friends who joined him in New York

were sipping champagne with Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo,

living a worldly life.

He said, "I feel like I'm watching the war from a theater seat."

[Nelson in English] This is a person

who had flown missions during the Second World War.

This is a person who had a dear Jewish friend, Leon Werth,

who was back in France, to whom he dedicated The Little Prince.

Saint-Exupery knew what it was to see his beloved world

at risk of annihilation.

[Eric Dupont speaking French]

On July 31st, he leaves for his 10th reconnaissance mission

over Grenoble, Lyon, and Belieu.

[Shaibata in English] The last flight still remains a mystery because

he was supposed to return to base after taking picture of Occupied France.

[Francois D'agay speaking French]

At first, I was told he was still alive...

Missing did not necessarily mean dead.

He had survived so many accidents and catastrophes.

[Schiff in English] We'll never know what happened on that last flight.

It's clear the plane crashed directly into the water at high speed.

[Shaibata] We finally identify the wreckage of the plane

in the Mediterranean Sea, not far from Marseille.

[Oliver D'agay] A fisherman found in his nets a bracelet...

He cleans the bracelet and he can read...

uh, Antoine de Saint-Exupery and the address of the publisher in New York.

It's a miracle, you've found the bracelet of Saint-Exupery,

now we know the plane is there.

And they were able to identify that, yes, that was the plane piloted

by Saint-Exupery on the 31st July, 1944.

[Consuelo speaking French]

When he had the accident in Guatemala

he promised me he would never fly again.

But, once he recovered he went back to flying.

The Little Prince left also with his flock of wild birds.

He continued flying.

The Little Prince is his spirit,

asking him, "Why would you abandon your rose?"

[Francois D'agay speaking French]

That death was a very harsh shock for her.

But, at the same time,

She didn't completely collapse.

She continued to live.

But, it was clear

that Antoine was the love of her life.

After that, she lived in her memories.

That was Aunt Consuelo.

[Nelson in English] We're used to having stories that tie up nicely.

Fairy tales with happy endings.

Saint-Exupery doesn't give us that.

When finally published in France, it's published after the war,

and he's no longer alive.

And obviously, the disappearance of The Little Prince at the end

reads differently in light of the author's death.

[Adam Gopnik] Saint-Exupery's disappearance

is part of the mystique of The Little Prince.

'Cause it seems to be so much the kind of thing that would happen

within the world of The Little Prince.

That The Aviator would fly off at the end into the unknown.

[The Aviator] And now six years have already gone by.

I have never yet told this story.

But there is one extraordinary thing,

when I drew the muzzle for The Little Prince,

I forgot to add the leather strap to it.

He will never have been able to fasten it on his sheep.

So now I keep on wondering...

[speaking French]

What happened there on his planet?

Look up at the sky.

Ask yourself,

"Has the sheep eaten the flower or not?"

And you'll see how everything changes.

[in English] This day has been magic.

-This is a magical day? -Yeah.

"No one flower is unique in the world."

[Francois D'agay speaking French]

Saint-Exupery wanted everyone to have a similar language.

To unite everyone

in one common context

without having to go to war.

The Little Prince is a universal message of peace.

[singing in Arabic]

[Schiff in English] As he will say of those early years in North Africa,

what matters is what you carry around inside you.

You're a treasure chest of memories.

And that that doesn't necessarily involve either language or words.

[Thomas De Koninck] The heart is the finest register that we have of all.

Hi!

[Thomas De Koninck] The importance of the heart with respect to love,

that's very important in The Little Prince.

An invisible essence.

[mellow instrumental music playing]