New interpretation … first published in 1943, and written and illustrated by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince has sold more than 80m copies
Experts have discovered two unpublished pages from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince which cast new light on the children’s classic and will be auctioned in May.
By Alison Flood
Rare unpublished pages from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince, which shed new light on the beloved story, have been discovered and are set to be auctioned later this month.
The pages were part of a collection of Saint-Exupéry’s writing passed to French auction house Artcurial by a private collector earlier this year. Reading through the material, experts were astonished to discover that it included two unpublished pages from The Little Prince, one of which features entirely original material and could give a political perspective to the story of the prince from a tiny planet who journeys through the universe before arriving on Earth.
“His writing is terrible, but we managed to interpret it and realised that two of the pages, among all these pages, were unpublished material from The Little Prince,” said Benoît Puttemans from Artcurial’s books department. “It was a big shock.” The Little Prince has sold millions of copies around the world. Saint-Exupéry died in action in 1944, the year after it was published.
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