Arts & Entertainment

The Little Prince’s original manuscript returns to France 75 years later

Paris, Feb 16 (EFE).- The Paris Museum of Decorative Arts is hosting an exhibit on The Little Prince novella by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry exposing its original drawings on display in France for the first time.

The exhibit, which opens its doors Thursday, shows over 600 documents around the illustrated book that was published in 1943, although it did not arrive in France until 1946, after the author’s death.

Saint-Exupéry, who was a French Resistance pilot, crashed in the Mediterranean in 1944 under mysterious circumstances.

“It is the most important exhibition that has been held,” the great-nephew of the writer, Olivier d’Agay told Efe.

“It is the first time in the world since 1943 that we find the original drawings of ‘The Little Prince’, dressed in majesty, with his yellow scarf; and for the first time in France we see the original manuscript,” he added.

The exhibition begins with documents from Saint-Exupéry’s childhood in a Lyon aristocratic family, his adventures as a pilot and reporter, which inspired his first novel Courrier Sud.

“He said that he could only tell what he had lived, he could not make fiction. So he wrote from real life things,” d’Agay said.

But over half of the rooms are dedicated to The Little Prince which has become the most translated book in the world after the Bible, being used as a learning tool.

The exhibit features drawings that will be displayed for the first time as will be the original manuscript, which was only previously exhibited in New York, in 2014, where it is kept by the Morgan Library & Museum. EFE

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