Le Petit Prince - Inspirations - Events and Characters

Events and Characters

In The Little Prince, its narrator, The Pilot, talks of being stranded in the desert beside his crashed aircraft. This account clearly drew on Saint-Exupéry's own experience in the Sahara, an ordeal described in detail in his 1939 memoir Wind, Sand and Stars (original French: Terre des hommes).

On December 30, 1935 at 02:45 am, after 19 hours and 44 minutes in the air, Saint-Exupéry, along with his copilot-navigator André Prévot, crashed in the Sahara desert. They were attempting to break the speed record for a Paris-to-Saigon flight in a then-popular type of air race, called a raid, and win a prize of 150,000 francs. Their plane was a Caudron C-630 Simoun, and the crash site is thought to have been near to the Wadi Natrun valley, close to the Nile Delta.

Both miraculously survived the crash, only to face rapid dehydration in the intense desert heat. Their maps were primitive and ambiguous. Lost among the sand dunes with a few grapes, a thermos of coffee, a single orange, and some wine, the pair had only one day's worth of liquid. They both began to see mirages, which were quickly followed by more vivid hallucinations. By the second and third days, they were so dehydrated that they stopped sweating altogether. Finally, on the fourth day, a Bedouin on a camel discovered them and administered a native rehydration treatment that saved Saint-Exupéry and Prévot's lives.

During his service as a mail pilot in the North African Sahara desert, Saint-Exupéry had viewed a fennec (desert sand fox), which most likely inspired him to create the fox character in the book. In a letter written to his sister Didi from the Western Sahara's Cape Juby, where he was the manager of an airmail stopover station in 1928, he tells of raising a fennec which he adored.

Many researchers believe that the prince's petulant, vain rose was very likely inspired by his Salvadoran wife Consuelo de Saint Exupéry, with the small home planet being inspired by her small home country El Salvador, also known as "The Land of Volcanoes" due to the area having so many of them. Despite a raucous marriage, Antoine kept Consuelo close to heart and portrayed her as the prince's Rose whom he tenderly protects with a wind screen and under a glass dome on his tiny planet. Saint-Exupéry's infidelity and the doubts of his marriage are symbolized by the vast field of roses the prince encounters during his visit to Earth.

In the novella the Wise Fox, believed to be modelled after the author's intimate New York City friend Sylvia Hamilton Reinhardt, tells the prince that his rose is unique and special, because she is the one that he loves. The novella's iconic phrase, "One sees clearly only with the heart", is believed to have been suggested by Reinhardt.

The fearsome, grasping baobab trees, researchers have contended, were meant to represent Nazism attempting to destroy the planet. The little prince's reassurance to the pilot that his dying body is only an empty shell resembles the last words of Antoine's dying younger brother François, who told the author, from his deathbed: "Don't worry. I'm all right. I can't help it. It's my body".

The literary device of presenting philosophical and social commentaries in the form of the impressions gained by a fictional extraterrestrial visitor to Earth had already been used by the philosopher and satirist Voltaire in his story Micromégas of 1752—a classic work in French literature which Saint-Exupéry was likely familiar with.